On Metaphor

[Bud Struggle]

To be honest I don't think many leftists have problems with actual women's breasts, more with people who feel the need to bring them up in completely unrelated conversations as well as harass female members of the board. Which, much more than being sexist, is just very weird and creepy.

But ACTUAL women's breasts have never been discussed. They were used in a metaphor for Liberty and Justice.

Here's a little RevLeft story about metaphor: In a PM exchange with a solid Communist here of longstanding (no names, of course) I ended a PM saying, "Please be kind during the Revolution."

The Communist then responded (not kidding) about the distance between our respective locations, what I would have to do to not get killed, and who to actually watch out for.

Nice person and all of that--but deadly serious about everything.

And that a lot of what I see here.

[LSD]

That is actually a truly excellent point.

The degree of seriousness that goes on on this board is seriously disturbed. I think there really are membrs of this board who are plotting for the "revolution" and the "overthrow of capitalism". These Cabble Street Reinacters have so deluded themselves into this 1930s wonderland that they're honestly surprised that 95% of the world thinks that communism is dead.

This place is fun, don't get me wrong. I loved my times here. But there's no "revolution" coming. The real world just doesn't have time for "class warfare". So lighten up! If communism's a joke, you might as well laugh along. The rest of us have already started.

[BurnTheOliveTree]

This place is fun, don't get me wrong. I loved my times here. But there's no "revolution" coming. The real world just doesn't have time for "class warfare". So lighten up! If communism's a joke, you might as well laugh along. The rest of us have already started.


I really don't see how making an effort to fight a system that you have directly acknowledged to be evil is all just a big silly joke. I don't know, I guess some of us really mean it. I guess some of us actually give a damn.

-Alex

[BurnTheOliveTree]

One of the ills of capitalism is that people don't dislike the idea of communism, they dislike the idea of wasting their effort and time for the benefit of most, when they'd rather have a larger benefit for the self.

They see their life as a mere 80 year phase in the immortal existence of non-existence--so why not make the most of it? Let's STEAL as much money as we can and live a life of pleasure while our fellow man slaves away.

Meanwhile, I'm sure kids in Africa are trying to make the most of their lives eh?


Short term emphasis placed on the self is definitely a problem, I agree. Thing is though, most people would stand to gain as individuals from an equal distribution of wealth. I think it's enitrely possible to be a selfish communist, if you look a little more long-term.

That said, it's not something I feel able to relate to. I really do care about everyone, not just me.

-Alex

[Bud Struggle]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe9kKf7SHco&feature=related

[BurnTheOliveTree]

Mmm, I agree with you mate.

I think that all criticisms of leftist ideology boil down to two main arguments:

1. Human nature is such that we function best as a society by competing against eachother, and cannot co-operate effectively.

2. "I, individually, care so much about myself that I'd rather say fuck society and try and become one of the exploiters".

The first one I think is the absolute heart of serious debate regarding capitalism and communism. The second depresses me, if I'm honest. What can you say to someone who honestly doesn't give a shit?

-Alex

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

This place is fun, don't get me wrong. I loved my times here. But there's no "revolution" coming. The real world just doesn't have time for "class warfare". So lighten up! If communism's a joke, you might as well laugh along. The rest of us have already started.

:rolleyes: When someone has less political awareness than Rolling fucking Stone (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/21830103/its_a_class_war_stupid/print), then you can be forgiven for taking their political opinions with a grain of salt the size of your fist.

[Bud Struggle]

Mmm, I agree with you mate.

I think that all criticisms of leftist ideology boil down to two main arguments:

1. Human nature is such that we function best as a society by competing against eachother, and cannot co-operate effectively.

2. "I, individually, care so much about myself that I'd rather say fuck society and try and become one of the exploiters".

The first one I think is the absolute heart of serious debate regarding capitalism and communism. The second depresses me, if I'm honest. What can you say to someone who honestly doesn't give a shit?

-Alex

If I may disagree. We cooperate if there is an incentive. We work together if there is an incentive. The thing is how to get more people, lots more people, involved in the incentive. It's not about taking away from the rich--dol;lar for dollar--it's nothing. It's all about how to get as many people INVOLVED in the system.

That "expoliters" thing is 1850 talk for bad mamagement. That's been said and done--that kind of Communism has been here and died. Nothing there to talk about. It's time to invent a NEW way of helping people outside the box of Capitalism and Marxism--two system that have tried and failed to help humanity.


The real world just doesn't have time for "class warfare". So lighten up! If communism's a joke, you might as well laugh along. The rest of us have already started. LSD is right even though he doesn't know it--what you people here are doing is a joke with your cyborgs and anti-religion stuff and your rigid anti-abortion rules. You can't even get the class you are fighting for to fight with you.

It's time to rethink Communism for the 21st century, because that 19th century stuff isn't cutting it.

There IS NO Revolution coming--so now what do we do?

[Demogorgon]

LSD is right even though he doesn't know it--what you people here are doing is a joke with your cyborgs and anti-religion stuff and your rigid anti-abortion rules. You can't even get the class you are fighting for to fight with you.

I think all of these things are ridiculous and have never met a Communist in the real world who would entertain such crap. This board simply seems to attract weird people.

I think it is worse with members from parts of the world where far-left politics simply aren't mainstream, that inevitably means that it will attract teenagers looking for both a good form of rebellion and also pure escapism. Such people will come on here, and not actually holding serious Communist views come out with the utter crap you see here sometimes.

Again though, real Communists, whatever our faults, don't come up with crap like that.

[Bud Struggle]

I think all of these things are ridiculous and have never met a Communist in the real world who would entertain such crap. This board simply seems to attract weird people.

I think it is worse with members from parts of the world where far-left politics simply aren't mainstream, that inevitably means that it will attract teenagers looking for both a good form of rebellion and also pure escapism. Such people will come on here, and not actually holding serious Communist views come out with the utter crap you see here sometimes.

Again though, real Communists, whatever our faults, don't come up with crap like that.

So how do we build a REAL Communism--or rather, a better world for EVERYONE?

I'd like to see what we CAN do instead of continually discussing what we aren't allowed to do.

[LSD]

LSD is right even though he doesn't know it

No, I'm right and I do know it, which is even cooler.

Now's not the time to "rethink communism". Communism is dead. Now's the time to rethink politics. To come up with something genuinely new. If we're going to be original, why stick with antiquated labels and decrepid paradigms. Forget the Marxist nonsense and nineteenth century rubbish, we need to start over.


When someone has less political awareness than Rolling fucking Stone, then you can be forgiven for taking their political opinions with a grain of salt the size of your fist.

Actually, I read that piece and I agree with it 100%. But they're using "class war" as a joke as a humour title to a serious piece about class stratification.

They're not talking about different classes litterally going to war with one another. ...but you are. You folks actually think there's going to be a physical class war; that there's going to be a full blown 1917 redux, with red banners waving and bayonettes charging.

I don't mean you particularly, NoXion. I like you, you're a reasonable person. I don't actually think that you believe in all that class war nonsense (though I know you have to make like you do ;). But there are actually people on this board who think that they're going to be "fighting in the streets" with the "proletariat" in the forseeable future.

And that's pretty fucking scary!

[Bud Struggle]

No, I'm right and I do know it, which is even cooler.

Now's not the time to "rethink communism". Communism is dead. Now's the time to rethink politics. To come up with something genuinely new. If we're going to be original, why stick with antiquated labels and decrepid paradigms. Forget the Marxist nonsense and nineteenth century rubbish, we need to start over.

Well, I don't know if that gleeful grin on your face is totally serious--but yea.

We need to enfranchise as many people on this earth as we can in a workable economic system--and Communism can't do the job. Been there and proven futile.

We have to rework Capitalism or rather a some sort of Capitalist Social Democracy. I think.

Hmmm. Actually LSD, reading your answer to NoXion is more scarey than you agreeing with me. Are you agreeing with me? No one has ever done that here before--and I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with it. :(

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Now's not the time to "rethink communism". Communism is dead. Now's the time to rethink politics. To come up with something genuinely new. If we're going to be original, why stick with antiquated labels and decrepid paradigms. Forget the Marxist nonsense and nineteenth century rubbish, we need to start over.

So what's your alternative?


Actually, I read that piece and I agree with it 100%. But they're using "class war" as a joke as a humour title to a serious piece about class stratification.Doesn't mean that it isn't happening. It's obvious that the ruling class are doing a hell of a lot to maintain the illusion of a harmonious bourgeouis society, but reality is that class war is happening.


They're not talking about different classes litterally going to war with one another. ...but you are. You folks actually think there's going to be a physical class war; that there's going to be a full blown 1917 redux, with red banners waving and bayonettes charging.Maybe the Leninists do... But I hardly imagine the other political tendencies on this forum have such an old-fashioned view of what class war is.

Class war isn't just about direct suppression of the revolutionary classes and the increasing tendency on the part of the ruling class to drop illusions about the liberty and fairness of bourgeouis society - every decision that deliberately hurts the revolutionary classes in any fashion is an expression of class war on the part of the ruling class. I believe Redstar2000 put it quite succinctly:


When workers are injured or killed on the job, that's ruling class violence. Some "cost-analysis" guy decided that this particular business could "afford" so many injuries and so many deaths per time period...and "top management" approved his decision. It was "cheaper" than the cost of the safety measures required to prevent those injuries or deaths.

When a product that is known to be unsafe is marketed anyway, that's ruling class violence. Someone decided that they could afford a certain number of food poisonings or hand injuries or whatever the danger might be...it would be "too costly" to prevent those injuries with a production or engineering change.

Did your explorations of the revolutionary left ever go beyond dreary Leninist/Trotskyist cliches?


I don't mean you particularly, NoXion. I like you, you're a reasonable person. I don't actually think that you believe in all that class war nonsense (though I know you have to make like you do ;). But there are actually people on this board who think that they're going to be "fighting in the streets" with the "proletariat" in the forseeable future.I genuinely believe that class war is happening, as a matter of fact, although my conception of it may differ radically from that of other members of this forum. I make no firm predictions about revolutionary activity I'm likely to be involved in, if at all. I simply don't know enough to take more than a wild guess.


And that's pretty fucking scary!If communism is "dead", why do you fear it's proponents?

[communard resolution]

LSD:

Revolutions don't have to involve a lot of bloodshed and the 1917 scenarios you've brought up. Sometimes a system just isn't sustainable any longer and must make way to whatever comes next. There have been velvet revolutions, you know? I come from a country that has seen one. Not that it necessarily changed things for the better in the long run, but then I'm from a country that has never seen a decent political system. Well, at least now you're free to leave the country if you want.

If you look at capitalism today, there are no crises that are recognised as such anymore... because late capitalism is one big, permanent crisis.

It' crap. It doesn't work. Not for the majority of people on this planet. It's only a matter of time until it's no longer sustainable and replaced with something else. Whether this will happen in our lifetimes or not, I honestly don't know.

I don't see a revolution happening in, say the US or UK in the foreseeable future if things stay more or less as they are for a while longer. But then, a lot of revolutions occurred in sudden extraordinary circumstances. e.g. when countries entered a war. How do you know who your country will be at war with in 20 years time and what will happen then? Just an example.

[Demogorgon]

So how do we build a REAL Communism--or rather, a better world for EVERYONE?

I'd like to see what we CAN do instead of continually discussing what we aren't allowed to do.

I think we should be talking about these kind of things too. We need to talk about what Communism can provide and how it can do it. We need to talk about how it can enhance democracy, personal autonomy, standards of living and so forth. I think we do this by replacing capitalism with an all together fairer economy without the current cruel financial system and with a clear system of democracy in the workplace.

On non-economic matters we need to talk about how we will enhance freedom, and yes what we will allow and not what we will ban. Hopefully things won't be banned. Certainly, to me, Communism has to back full freedom of religion and allow all forms of dissent. What people here seem to forget sometimes is that everybody believes in freedom of speech for people who agree with them, it is backing it for people who disagree that marks out your attitude to freedom.

And when we talk about freedom we need to get down to real freedom that actually matters to people who have finished puberty. Nihilistic talk of drugs everywhere doesn't count (don't get me wrong, prohibition has to end, but saying five year olds should be allowed heroin is absolutely absurd). I think vital to freedom for all people is perhaps most of all a simple attempt to create a level of tolerance that means that people can simply accept people as people rather than forever try to pigeonhole them into one category or another (class matters incidentally, because it explains how society becomes stratified and of course, ultimately certain people have worked their way into a position where they have far too much power over others. But again that has to be the point of reference. Class division is wrong because it leads to domination by certain people over others. Not because hatred of certain individuals are a good thing).

There is a problem here perhaps because of some influence of the RCP, a party whose sole purpose so far as I can tell is to take as extreme position as possible on every issue so that the students can join it can shock their parents. That is why the RevLeft position on abortion is so absurdly strict (there are certain members who openly mock anybody who has children incidentally, saying that abortion is always better). It is also leading, more seriously, to extreme intolerance of certain minorities. Some members here have felt the need to adopt radical feminism. Now don't get me wrong, standard feminism is an excellent position and one that I have no problem endorsing, but radical feminism insists that gender is an entirely social construct. That biological distinctions between genders are entirely incidental. When presented with compelling evidence to the contrary, that is to say the existence of transgendered people, people who have a gender identity entirely different from that of their physical bodies and often have to have extensive surgery to correct their bodies, they respond with hatred. They mock transgendered people, say that male to female transgendered people are rapists, say that such people are mentally ill. This level of prejudice against a highly discriminated minority shocks me, but it is here alright.

Of course, some of the members taking such a position are faking it. I will let you in on a little secret, there are a good number of CC members who are against abortion, they just don't admit it publicly on the boards. Some of them (and if a certain member doesn't shut up soon I may be forced to name him, he knows who he is) feel the need to overcompensate by taking an absurdly rigid position regarding board policy. Several of the idiots who voted for my expulsion from the CC due to my position on abortion policy are people that I know for a fact to be pro-life in private. That they can't discuss it openly is outrageous, though the fact that they don't have the courage of their convictions to even discuss it openly on a message board is perhaps even more ridiculous.

Anyway this has turned more into a rant about this board than I was intending, I am very pissed off by a noisy minority of posters here and it has come out in this post, so I will say positive things too. Most of the people on this board are excellent individuals who don't subscribe to much of the crap that you see here. I am sure that many people who read this will agree entirely with me.

Anyway this is my manifesto I guess. Humanistic, tolerant Communism.

[Bud Struggle]

We are all ears for you and TomK to give us a theory for a better system than communsim. Until then, we are communists on this board, regardless of how tired the system may be to you.

The is a project for humanity not a Glorious Leader. And a 9 posts you have got a way to go before you can speak for anyone.

[LSD]

So what's your alternative?

I don't have one.

I know, it's not the answer you wanted. It's certainly not the one I want. But it's the truth. I don't know what the solution is. But I think the first step is to admit that. To admit that the old solutions have failed. That collectivazation and communalism and every variety therein has only lead to decay and degradation.

I'm sane enough to recognize that the world is screwed up, but I'm humble enough to realize that I'm no messiah, and I'm not in possession of some magic formula that will cure the world's ills. We'd all like to be heroes, to know the right words or right plan that can fix things. It's comforting to have answers. In the end, that's what good leaders do, they comfort, they provide easy answers to hard questions.

That's what Marx did, and it worked ...for a time. But then it didn't. And then it really didn't, and here we are, one hundred and fifty years later, looking back on an amateur Prussian academic scetching out his "iron laws of history" to the candlelight.

After all the deaths and all the misery, and all the utter catastrophic failure how can you seriously expect anyone to look to that source again? How can you ask us to walk that far too worn path one more time?

I don't know what the alternative is. But I know what it isn't. It's isn't "revolution".


Doesn't mean that it isn't happening. It's obvious that the ruling class are doing a hell of a lot to maintain the illusion of a harmonious bourgeouis society, but reality is that class war is happening.

No, reality is that class is happening. The "war" part is just in your head. Wars involve fighting, they involve armies and battle plans. What we have know is just life, with all the brutal ugliness that goes along with it. But brutality doesn't a "class war" make. Now you can call it a "class war" if you like, I suppose you could call it a "race war" too -- God Knows, some do. But it doesn't make it so.

No, class wars are real, they happen, or I should say they have happened when triggered by opportunistic leaders and appropriate ideologies. Cambodia had a class war, but it didn't work out so good. 'Cause the thing about wars is that people tend to die in them, lots of people, more than in times of peace.

So while I don't know what the answers are, I'm fairly certain that killing vast swashes of the population probably won't help.


If communism is "dead", why do you fear it's proponents?

I don't fear them, Nox. I fear for them. I fear for a society in which people are driven to such nonsense and absurdity in a desperate struggle for meaning.


If you look at capitalism today, there are no crises that are recognised as such anymore... because late capitalism is one big, permanent crisis.

:lol:

How many decades now have you people been saying that? Marx said it, so did Lenin, so did Stalin and Trotsky, so did every Trotskyist newsletter from 1940 to the present. Every year, some article about how capitalism was on its "last legs" and "socialism" was just around the corner.

Every market correction, every recession, every political crisis, and the communist press announced with absolute confidence and boundless glee that the revolution is imminent!

There is no "late capitalism", we're barely in "middle" capitalism. The "bourgeois state" is not struggling to keep capitalism afloat, nor is government intervention in the market at a particularly high point these days. As communists are so keen in pointing out, we're actually seeing a far more free market these days than we did in the 60s and 70s.

If anything, capitalism is uniquely strong today, while the welfare state is taking a bit of a hit. That happens from time to time, of course, and my bet is that this current age of economic liberalism is on its last legs.

As far as the communists are concerned, though, it's just another sign of the end-times. You know, you're a lot like the Christian right; in your warped paradigm, nothing can just happen, it's all a sign of some grande imminent catastrophe.

Two things I'm certain of, fifty years from now, there will still be Christian nuts running around proclaiming that the apocalypse is upon us, and somewhere, some little Trotskyist rag will be proclaiming that the revolution has come.

It's all so damned tragic and hilarious at the same time.


I think we should be talking about these kind of things too. We need to talk about what Communism can provide and how it can do it. We need to talk about how it can enhance democracy, personal autonomy, standards of living and so forth. I think we do this by replacing capitalism with an all together fairer economy without the current cruel financial system and with a clear system of democracy in the workplace.

No, no, no. You're still not getting it. We need to start talking about democracy and standards of living. But we need to dump all this "communism" nonsense. We need to stop talking about "revolution" and start dealing with the real world. With real life problems to which all your "revolutionary" bluster has absolutely no relation.

We can't "replace" capitalism, but we can hamper it. We can iron out its more brutal wrinkles and restrain its crueler outbursts.

That's not particularly "revolutionary" I grant you, but at least it's doable.


And when we talk about freedom we need to get down to real freedom that actually matters to people who have finished puberty.

I think you might be drifting a little. But you're right, a good deal of this board's immaturity can probably be attributed to demographics. You can't really blame teenagers for acting like, well, teenagers.


There is a problem here perhaps because of some influence of the RCP

um ...OK, now you've completely lost me. You can criticize the RCP for a lot of things, but I hardly see how you can blame them for Revleft! :P


I will let you in on a little secret, there are a good number of CC members who are against abortion, they just don't admit it publicly on the boards.

OK... now I don't know what you're going on about.

Secret anti-abortion movements? Conspiracies in the CC? God, this place has completely collapsed since I've left!

Well, if you know these individuals, I suggest you should name them, immediately! Not only because you are obligated to do so by standing CC directives, but because it would make for really awesome netDrama!

Come on, you know you want to. These people want to come forward anyway, they just need you to give them that one last push. It's good for them, it's good for the board. Hell, it's good for COMMUNISM.

By golly, it's what Karl Marx would want you to do! :marx:

[Bud Struggle]

I think we should be talking about these kind of things too. We need to talk about what Communism can provide and how it can do it. We need to talk about how it can enhance democracy, personal autonomy, standards of living and so forth. I think we do this by replacing capitalism with an all together fairer economy without the current cruel financial system and with a clear system of democracy in the workplace.

On non-economic matters we need to talk about how we will enhance freedom, and yes what we will allow and not what we will ban. Hopefully things won't be banned. Certainly, to me, Communism has to back full freedom of religion and allow all forms of dissent. What people here seem to forget sometimes is that everybody believes in freedom of speech for people who agree with them, it is backing it for people who disagree that marks out your attitude to freedom.

And when we talk about freedom we need to get down to real freedom that actually matters to people who have finished puberty. Nihilistic talk of drugs everywhere doesn't count (don't get me wrong, prohibition has to end, but saying five year olds should be allowed heroin is absolutely absurd). I think vital to freedom for all people is perhaps most of all a simple attempt to create a level of tolerance that means that people can simply accept people as people rather than forever try to pigeonhole them into one category or another (class matters incidentally, because it explains how society becomes stratified and of course, ultimately certain people have worked their way into a position where they have far too much power over others. But again that has to be the point of reference. Class division is wrong because it leads to domination by certain people over others. Not because hatred of certain individuals are a good thing).

There is a problem here perhaps because of some influence of the RCP, a party whose sole purpose so far as I can tell is to take as extreme position as possible on every issue so that the students can join it can shock their parents. That is why the RevLeft position on abortion is so absurdly strict (there are certain members who openly mock anybody who has children incidentally, saying that abortion is always better). It is also leading, more seriously, to extreme intolerance of certain minorities. Some members here have felt the need to adopt radical feminism. Now don't get me wrong, standard feminism is an excellent position and one that I have no problem endorsing, but radical feminism insists that gender is an entirely social construct. That biological distinctions between genders are entirely incidental. When presented with compelling evidence to the contrary, that is to say the existence of transgendered people, people who have a gender identity entirely different from that of their physical bodies and often have to have extensive surgery to correct their bodies, they respond with hatred. They mock transgendered people, say that male to female transgendered people are rapists, say that such people are mentally ill. This level of prejudice against a highly discriminated minority shocks me, but it is here alright.

Of course, some of the members taking such a position are faking it. I will let you in on a little secret, there are a good number of CC members who are against abortion, they just don't admit it publicly on the boards. Some of them (and if a certain member doesn't shut up soon I may be forced to name him, he knows who he is) feel the need to overcompensate by taking an absurdly rigid position regarding board policy. Several of the idiots who voted for my expulsion from the CC due to my position on abortion policy are people that I know for a fact to be pro-life in private. That they can't discuss it openly is outrageous, though the fact that they don't have the courage of their convictions to even discuss it openly on a message board is perhaps even more ridiculous.

Anyway this has turned more into a rant about this board than I was intending, I am very pissed off by a noisy minority of posters here and it has come out in this post, so I will say positive things too. Most of the people on this board are excellent individuals who don't subscribe to much of the crap that you see here. I am sure that many people who read this will agree entirely with me.

Anyway this is my manifesto I guess. Humanistic, tolerant Communism.

Brilliant post. If there is a magic to Communism, if there are good and decent people in Commuinism looking for a better world--tolerent, free and nuturing to all--this is what it looks like.

[Demogorgon]

No, no, no. You're still not getting it. We need to start talking about democracy and standards of living. But we need to dump all this "communism" nonsense. We need to stop talking about "revolution" and start dealing with the real world. With real life problems to which all your "revolutionary" bluster has absolutely no relation.How often do I talk about revolution? Certainly only when it is brought up. Any solution that might work is obviously worth discussing and I don't care what you call it. I refer to myself as a Communist here, because it just keeps myself simple. In real life I call myself a Socialist because it has a far more positive meaning where I live. I am open to any suggestion as to what would work and I certainly wish to be realistic, but it has to cut both ways. There is going to be no glorious uprising in the style of the past, or at least not that I can conceive of. Times change. But on the other hand, capitalism is not some flexible clay to be molded how we wish it to be, if we want a just system it has to go. Dramatic battles on the streets are nothing but fantasy of course, but alternatives still need to be found.


We can't "replace" capitalism, but we can hamper it. We can iron out its more brutal wrinkles and restrain its crueler outbursts.

That's not particularly "revolutionary" I grant you, but at least it's doable.

No, because capitalism is not infinitely flexible. Its flaws go right down to its routes. Fundamentally it is a system that causes social stratification and even if you were to fix it up enough that absolute poverty were to be eliminated, it would still lead to expanding relative poverty, and that hurts all of society.

Nope, one way or another it needs to go. It will go eventually of course. Nothing lasts forever after all. We don't know when it will go, obviously I would prefer it be sooner.


I think you might be drifting a little. But you're right, a good deal of this board's immaturity can probably be attributed to demographics. You can't really blame teenagers for acting like, well, teenagers.

True, but you can't blame grumpy bastards like me for being grumpy bastards either!


um ...OK, now you've completely lost me. You can criticize the RCP for a lot of things, but I hardly see how you can blame them for Revleft! :P

I didn't say the RCP was doing it, I was saying members of this board who have fallen into their way of thinking were doing it


OK... now I don't know what you're going on about.

Secret anti-abortion movements? Conspiracies in the CC? God, this place has completely collapsed since I've left!

Hang on, did I say anything like that? There is certainly no secret anti-abortion movement here, simply pro-life people that don't reveal their actual positions and participate in the witch hunts with extra enthusiasm to try and deflect attention.

You can hardly compare it to any conspiracy. What it resembles is the deeply in the closet gay teenager who participates in playground homophobia so that they aren't suspected. Hardly dramatic.

[Bud Struggle]

I don't have one. An that we can agree--me neither.


I know, it's not the answer you wanted. It's certainly not the one I want. But it's the truth. I don't know what the solution is. But I think the first step is to admit that. To admit that the old solutions have failed. That collectivazation and communalism and every variety therein has only lead to decay and degradation. Amen brother. I've been preaching that song, too.


I'm sane enough to recognize that the world is screwed up, but I'm humble enough to realize that I'm no messiah, and I'm not in possession of some magic formula that will cure the world's ills. We'd all like to be heroes, to know the right words or right plan that can fix things. It's comforting to have answers. In the end, that's what good leaders do, they comfort, they provide easy answers to hard questions. Right.


That's what Marx did, and it worked ...for a time. But then it didn't. And then it really didn't, and here we are, one hundred and fifty years later, looking back on an amateur Prussian academic scetching out his "iron laws of history" to the candlelight. It never worked--some elitists just thought it did. Nobody on a collective farm thought Marxism was working.


After all the deaths and all the misery, and all the utter catastrophic failure how can you seriously expect anyone to look to that source again? How can you ask us to walk that far too worn path one more time? I've been preaching that myself.


I don't know what the alternative is. But I know what it isn't. It's isn't "revolution". At this point you are quoting me.


No, reality is that class is happening. The "war" part is just in your head. Wars involve fighting, they involve armies and battle plans. What we have know is just life, with all the brutal ugliness that goes along with it. But brutality doesn't a "class war" make. Now you can call it a "class war" if you like, I suppose you could call it a "race war" too -- God Knows, some do. But it doesn't make it so. Well there certainly isn't an "war" that's for sure. But I'm not so certain that there's even any class. At least no class that anyone in the proletarian class will admit to.


No, class wars are real, they happen, or I should say they have happened when triggered by opportunistic leaders and appropriate ideologies. It never should have happened because there was never anything "there" to fight against. We met the enemy and they were us.


Cambodia had a class war, but it didn't work out so good. 'Cause the thing about wars is that people tend to die in them, lots of people, more than in times of peace. Cambodia is EXACTLY what Marxist class war looks like. everyone runs around and says that Pol Pot wasn't really a Marxist. He was the LIVING SOUL of Marxism. And that is what it looks like.


So while I don't know what the answers are, I'm fairly certain that killing vast swashes of the population probably won't help. Unless they are priests.


How many decades now have you people been saying that? Marx said it, so did Lenin, so did Stalin and Trotsky, so did every Trotskyist newsletter from 1940 to the present. Every year, some article about how capitalism was on its "last legs" and "socialism" was just around the corner. "Theory" is little lese but that.


There is no "late capitalism", we're barely in "middle" capitalism. The "bourgeois state" is not struggling to keep capitalism afloat, nor is government intervention in the market at a particularly high point these days. As communists are so keen in pointing out, we're actually seeing a far more free market these days than we did in the 60s and 70s. Right.


If anything, capitalism is uniquely strong today, while the welfare state is taking a bit of a hit. That happens from time to time, of course, and my bet is that this current age of economic liberalism is on its last legs. Yes. No arguments.


As far as the communists are concerned, though, it's just another sign of the end-times. You know, you're a lot like the Christian right; in your warped paradigm, nothing can just happen, it's all a sign of some grande imminent catastrophe. There is no difference between Jesus's secon comming and the Revolution.


Two things I'm certain of, fifty years from now, there will still be Christian nuts running around proclaiming that the apocalypse is upon us, and somewhere, some little Trotskyist rag will be proclaiming that the revolution has come. Yea.


No, no, no. You're still not getting it. We need to start talking about democracy and standards of living. But we need to dump all this "communism" nonsense. We need to stop talking about "revolution" and start dealing with the real world. With real life problems to which all your "revolutionary" bluster has absolutely no relation. No arguemnts.


We can't "replace" capitalism, but we can hamper it. We can iron out its more brutal wrinkles and restrain its crueler outbursts. i keep agreeing. You are stealing my philosophical ground. :(


Secret anti-abortion movements? Conspiracies in the CC? God, this place has completely collapsed since I've left! My fault. I promise to stop it.


Well, if you know these individuals, I suggest you should name them, immediately! Not only because you are obligated to do so by standing CC directives, but because it would make for really awesome netDrama!

Come on, you know you want to. These people want to come forward anyway, they just need you to give them that one last push. It's good for them, it's good for the board. Hell, it's good for COMMUNISM.

By golly, it's what Karl Marx would want you to do! :marx:

Honestly, I don't know you from "the past" but you are preaching my line.

Tom

[communard resolution]

How many decades now have you people been saying that? Marx said it, so did Lenin, so did Stalin and Trotsky, so did every Trotskyist newsletter from 1940 to the present.

Wait. So Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky didn't actually live to see a revolution?

Why don't you quote me fully? I said I honestly didn't know whether another revolution will occur in our lifetimes or not, I just don't think the current system is infinitely sustainable.

And as you said yourself, sometimes a lot unexpected things just happen.

[LSD]

Honestly, I don't know you from "the past" but you are preaching my line.

It was my line first (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=71910). ;)

[Lynx]

Brilliant post. If there is a magic to Communism, if there are good and decent people in Commuinism looking for a better world--tolerent, free and nuturing to all--this is what it looks like.
Yes, and this is RevLeft: the good, the bad and the ugly. Just like the western, just like life. Why do you seem to be having trouble accepting the other two?

Oh, and the thing about solutions is... they require goals.

Great thread :thumbup:

[Bud Struggle]

It sounds like you're limiting my knowledge and respect to that of a internet forum? I may be new to this board--I'm not new to fighting for a just cause.

(How about you try and get rid of those bars before you try and speak for anyone we have respect for:p)

I wish I could get rid of these bars. They are the mark of shame given to everyone that's been Restricted by RevLeft.

All the Restricted people have them.


Well... there actually is quite a large difference.

Jesus' second arrival or whatever you want to call it, is scientifically impossible, unless you want to ignore all logic and reason.

Revolutions are social actions, and although you may think neither will happen, the first is impossible (although, you capitalists like to think it may be), the second has a countdown I'm sure. I'm giving even money on both.

[Bud Struggle]

It was my line first (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=71910). ;)

Funny--you ended just about the time I started. :)

Great post, BTW.

[Bud Struggle]

On the topic of restrictions, I do think capitalists should be restricted. I agree.


I've noticted (correct me if I'm wrong) that pro-lifers are restricted, who are otherwise genuine lefties--something I think HAS to change. You are right abut that. Rabid pro aboution people seem to be doing more harm to Communism than Ronald Reagan.


This forum is for left-wing people is it not? We should embrace each other like true comrades, not restrict people because they hold views that are not directly related to the core aim of communism--to do away with private business and give the means of production to the proletariat.

If someone could enlighten me on how someone's views on abortion interfere with the greater good of their views?
I can't help you there.

[Bud Struggle]

That's really quite sad to think that's the case here. I'm no pro-lifer, but to restrict people for that is pathetic.

Just watch what's going on over in the abortion thread as we speak.

Nice to meet you.

[TheCultofAbeLincoln]

That's really quite sad to think that's the case here. I'm no pro-lifer, but to restrict people for that is pathetic.

This site is more Student-Left than Worker-Left.

I think everyone ought to dump all the Marxist crap. Even if he's your philosophical inspiration, history has judged from the people who hung up his portrait before you that he's a bad influence.

What we need is a revolution of Thought. A realization that materialist fetishes are ridiculous, obese, and accomplish nothing in terms of true satisfaction. A truly minimalist approach to life in general.

For all the big SUVs, swimming pools, plasma TVs, et al, what we really sacrificed was our culture, especially here in America. Sure, we have some of the prettiest girls in the world, but who cares if the vast majority of their collective thought has to do with superficial nonsense?

What I'd like to see is a rejection of this bankrupt, meaningless lifestyle. Then I'd have some hope.

[Plagueround]

This site is more Student-Left than Worker-Left.

Perhaps. Being a student isn't much different than being a worker these days. You put in a lot of crap and get very little out of it in the end.


I think everyone ought to dump all the Marxist crap. Even if he's your philosophical inspiration, history has judged from the people who hung up his portrait before you that he's a bad influence.Some of Marx's ideas still have value. So do Abe Lincoln,s, TomK's, LSD's, mine, Eintstein's, Stalin's, George Washington's, Barack Obama's, Emma Goldman's, Kermit the Frog's, Christ's, Spongebob's...ok, I'll stop...but you get the idea. We should take all our influences and make something unique out of it instead of making ourselves into our influences.


What we need is a revolution of Thought. A realization that materialist fetishes are ridiculous, obese, and accomplish nothing in terms of true satisfaction. A truly minimalist approach to life in general.I don't know if minimalist is the right term, but I agree people could be much less materialistic.


For all the big SUVs, swimming pools, plasma TVs, et al, what we really sacrificed was our culture, especially here in America. Sure, we have some of the prettiest girls in the world, but who cares if the vast majority of their collective thought has to do with superficial nonsense?The vast majority cares, unfortunately. Many of the ideas presented here are with the aim of promoting caring about something greater than superficial materialism, but you see how quickly most people dismiss them. Then again, the advocates of priest killing and idolizing of some of history's worst examples of attempts at socialism don't help either.


What I'd like to see is a rejection of this bankrupt, meaningless lifestyle. Then I'd have some hope.This may mean letting go of many ideals you hold that have sprung from such a system. ;)

As for this thread in general...I have my beliefs and I know what I stand for. Perhaps they are a utopian pipe dream to some, but I won't settle for anything less. Doesn't mean we can't do some good along the way though.

[pusher robot]

This site is more Student-Left than Worker-Left.

I think everyone ought to dump all the Marxist crap. Even if he's your philosophical inspiration, history has judged from the people who hung up his portrait before you that he's a bad influence.

What we need is a revolution of Thought. A realization that materialist fetishes are ridiculous, obese, and accomplish nothing in terms of true satisfaction. A truly minimalist approach to life in general.

For all the big SUVs, swimming pools, plasma TVs, et al, what we really sacrificed was our culture, especially here in America. Sure, we have some of the prettiest girls in the world, but who cares if the vast majority of their collective thought has to do with superficial nonsense?

What I'd like to see is a rejection of this bankrupt, meaningless lifestyle. Then I'd have some hope.

If you haven't seen Wall-E yet, you really should.

[Qwerty Dvorak]

Now's not the time to "rethink communism". Communism is dead. Now's the time to rethink politics. To come up with something genuinely new. If we're going to be original, why stick with antiquated labels and decrepid paradigms. Forget the Marxist nonsense and nineteenth century rubbish, we need to start over.
Em, wouldn't that have been Marx's idea? The whole point of Marxism was to create something radically and genuinely new. 160 years on that something new is getting very, very old. So your answer is, what? What magical new alternative to capitalism, which won't completely die out like all the other alternatives to capitalism, do you propose?

[PigmerikanMao]

My bet is on communalism :)

[LSD]

No, because capitalism is not infinitely flexible. Its flaws go right down to its routes. Fundamentally it is a system that causes social stratification and even if you were to fix it up enough that absolute poverty were to be eliminated, it would still lead to expanding relative poverty, and that hurts all of society.

"Hurts all of society" compared to what. Capitalism may not be fun, but it sure beats everything that's come before. And, unfortunately, the preponderance of evidence indicates that it's beats every contemporary alternative as well.

There are a lot of problems with the market, no doubt, and over the past couple hundred years, we've come up with all sorts of inventive solutions to try and soften its harder edges. But every time that some starry-eyed idealist has tried to completely junk the market, it's resulted in absolute disaster.

Being a starry-eyed idealist yourself, I have no doubt that you'll come up with all sorts of reasons for that; chief among them, no doubt, that it's all Stalin's fault and that "material conditions" were never right.

Well, in the real world material conditions are rarely perfect, and when things are shitty, it's all the more important that economic systems actually preform. If your "socialism" can only function in the most ideal of circumstances -- as in, when the country is "developed" enough (whatever that means), when the population is "evolved" enough (talk about Orwellian...), when the leadership is "proletarian" enough, and most fantastically of all, when the rest of the world joins in (!) -- then you're no better than the libertarians, harping on about a vague utopia that can never come to pass.


Real communism has never been tried. So how can something that has never been tried a dead idea?

Communism has actually been tried quite a few times. From Russia to China to Spain to Nicaragua, there's hardly a corner of this earth that hasn't had some sort of flirtation with Marxist political theory. You can criticize the results, but you can't deny the intention.

No, what you meant to say was that real communism has never been achieved; that while millions of people in dozens of countries have tried for it, they've never quite gotten the formula down right.

But hey, class struggle isn't easy, right? And the "bourgeoisie" took a long time to achieve power too ...didn't they?

Well, actually, no.

You know, there's something deliciously ironic about this entire interchange in that I recognize many of your arguments as one's I've made myself; I must have made the above argument about a hundred times since joining the board. It's not a terrible argument. In fact, I was always rather proud of it myself, since it combines all the best features of political rhetoric. It's just specific enough to be convincing and just vague enough to avoid anything directly refutable.

The problem with it, though, has always been that it is basically a defense for everything. Fascism didn't work? No problem, liberal revolutions also failed. Stalinism collapsed into a big steaming mess of crap? No worries! Look how long it took for "bourgeois capitalism" to get on its feet!

So basically we're left in a sort of optimistic hell, in which any political theory is workable, just so long as you're willing to abide failure after failure. 'Cause failure, it doesn't mean anything, everything fails at first...

Only that's not entirely true, is it? I mean, sure, there were a number of failed liberal revolutions over the years. But the United States has been operating under bascially the same set of principles for about 250 years now. The restoration in France put an end to the more idealistic dreams of the Jacobites and sans-cullotes, but feudalism never really came back to France.

In fact nowhere did feudalism manage to reinsert itself following a capitalist transition. Political regimes came and went, but once the market emerged as the cental economic mover, it never went away.

Largely, of course, that's because so much of capitalism is dependent of development. You need a certain technological and sociological base before you can have a true market exchange. I think pretty much everyone on this board would agree with that. But history shows more than that, not only does sufficient development invariably lead to some form of market economy, but once that transition happens, it can't be reversed.

Once the technology for capitalism exists, feudalism can no longer operate. It's not that the "bourgeois" "overthrew" feudalism, it's that feudalism ceased to be workable in a society that had materially transcended it.

Which is why the entire notion of "bourgeois revolution" is nonsensical to begin with. France had a revolution, but England didn't. Neither did Germany or Japan or a dozen other developed countries around the world. And yet every single one, in remarkably short order, transitioned to capitalism.

There were no "failed bourgeois revolutions" becaue there were no "bourgeois revolutions at all! There were political revolutions, sure, and many of them were instigated by wealthy commoners upset over the lingering influence of the aristocracy. But that's not "class war", it's just good old fashioned social change.

There are no "prime movers" in history. Class has always been an important dynamic, and remains so today, but it is not the end of the story. Human beings just aren't that fucking simplistic. Marx wanted to find an easy answer to the problems of politics and history, and he came up with one -- it's all about class.

The problem is he also came up with a lot of things surrounding that notion, like "iron laws" of history that are demonstrably false and a "labour theory" of value that's ludicrous on face.

Class matters, but it's just one aspect of a very complicated very interwoven tapestry. For a time, the academic world forgot that an Marxianism was a serious philisophical idea. Thankfully, we've moved on as a society.

The days of anyone taking Marxism seriously have long since died, and they're not coming back. Sure, you can find a scattering of true believers if you look hard enough. For instance, there's this message board with something like 7,000 members (although only about 200 are actually active.

But then Stormfront gets that number of visitors every hour.


Em, wouldn't that have been Marx's idea? The whole point of Marxism was to create something radically and genuinely new. 160 years on that something new is getting very, very old. So your answer is, what? What magical new alternative to capitalism, which won't completely die out like all the other alternatives to capitalism, do you propose?

I don't have one. But what I do know is that whatever the answer is, it won't be found in the obscure scribblings of long dead Prussian mystics. Nor, indeed, will it be in any manner "magical".

I know that you were using that word fecetiously, that you were trying to cleverly insinuate that I am being unrealistic in my critiques; but I think you accidently hit on a very serious issue. Namely, that at its core, Marxism is all about "magical alternatives".

Marxism doesn't propose real solutions to hard questions, it proposes bypassing those problems by "revolting" against them. Instead of living in the world we have and squarely facing reality, the communist spends his political life obsessed with some vague "postcapitalist" utopia of empty platitudes and outlandish absolutes.

Now, magical solutions are attractive, no doubt -- how else do you explain the enduring popularity of one Mr. Christ. But they have the more than slight drawback of being practically useless.

So how about we leave the "magic" in the past and start dealing with reality. It's a whole lot messier, and nearly as fun, but in the end we may just be able to do some real world good.


For all the big SUVs, swimming pools, plasma TVs, et al, what we really sacrificed was our culture, especially here in America. Sure, we have some of the prettiest girls in the world, but who cares if the vast majority of their collective thought has to do with superficial nonsense?

Yeah, 'cause asceticism always works out nicely... :glare:

Exactly which part of "America's culture" would you like to reclaim? The part where Americans eradicate native Americans, or where they forcibly enslaved the population of Africa?

Oh wait, I know, it's where American women didn't get the vote until the 1920s and are still are paid substantially less than their male counterparts. Better that they just stay at home, though, right? After all, it's not like "pretty girls" have any real contributions to make, their heads so full of "superficial nonsense". :angry:

The communists might be living in an impossible utopia, but at least they're looking forward. People like you are far more despicable, you want to move society back in time, to undo progress that took centuries of hard work, and millions of deaths.

You dishonour every person of good consience who struggled and fought to give us the better world we have today. You are the epitome of reaction.


This site is more Student-Left than Worker-Left.

And that surprises you? Workers don't have time for this crap, they're too busy ...working. Students spend most of their day thinking about things, so it's hardly surprising that they're liable to get caught in fringe political movements.


That's really quite sad to think that's the case here. I'm no pro-lifer, but to restrict people for that is pathetic.

Maybe, but if it wasn't done, you'd see abortion threads in every single forum of the board. At least this way, they're confined to one place.

I tend to agree that this board takes an overly harsh line on this subject, especially since it's such a controversial issue with so many moral nuances. But you have to understand that for many people this is a no mas subject and the idea of conversing with someone who doesn't share their conviction is almost unthinkable.

Personally I think that that kind of ideological rigidity is a main reason that we get into so much trouble, but then I'm not exactly in a position to influence board policy any more... :lol:


I wish I could get rid of these bars. They are the mark of shame given to everyone that's been Restricted by RevLeft.

Actually, I don'd mind the bars. They're harmless fun, and practically an easy way to identify who's restricted and who isn't.


Funny--you ended just about the time I started.

Yeah, I didn't think I remembered you from my day.

It's nice to see that at least someone here is trying to take a nuanced approach to politics. Personally, I think that a good number of people here actually agree with us than they'd admit. But this board encourages a kind of radical posturing, in which to "fit in" members are unable to admit their doubts regarding "revolutionary" politics.

This board is kind of like a secular church, in which parishoners say the right words and listen to the sermons, but then go home and live their lives unaffected.

But there always is that significant group that actually takes this crap seriously; and I highly doubt there's anything I can say that will change their minds.

[Qwerty Dvorak]

I don't have one. But what I do know is that whatever the answer is, it won't be found in the obscure scribblings of long dead Prussian mystics. Nor, indeed, will it be in any manner "magical".

I know that you were using that word fecetiously, that you were trying to cleverly insinuate that I am being unrealistic in my critiques; but I think you accidently hit on a very serious issue. Namely, that at its core, Marxism is all about "magical alternatives".

Marxism doesn't propose real solutions to hard questions, it proposes bypassing those problems by "revolting" against them. Instead of living in the world we have and squarely facing reality, the communist spends his political life obsessed with some vague "postcapitalist" utopia of empty platitudes and outlandish absolutes.

Now, magical solutions are attractive, no doubt -- how else do you explain the enduring popularity of one Mr. Christ. But they have the more than slight drawback of being practically useless.

So how about we leave the "magic" in the past and start dealing with reality. It's a whole lot messier, and nearly as fun, but in the end we may just be able to do some real world good.
I didn't hit on any point accidentally. I don't know if you've noticed but I am a restricted member here and that was exactly the point I was trying to make. I find your stance to be hypocritical. You say that we have to think of something "genuinely new", we need to "rethink politics" and "start over". But aren't these exactly the kind of arguments used by Marxists to avoid reality? The idea that any vehicle for progress currently in existence is corrupt and ultimately useless is key to communist ideology and what keeps leftists on the fringe of political debate. Yet it seems to be what you are suggesting. Why do we need something genuinely new? We can't we work with what we have? It's not a very attractive option but it's the only thing that's ever worked before.

[LSD]

You're right, I misunderstood what you were saying and I apologize. I just assumed that you were defending Marxism. That's usually a good assumption on this board.

Sorry. ;)


I find your stance to be hypocritical. You say that we have to think of something "genuinely new", we need to "rethink politics" and "start over". But aren't these exactly the kind of arguments used by Marxists to avoid reality? The idea that any vehicle for progress currently in existence is corrupt and ultimately useless is key to communist ideology and what keeps leftists on the fringe of political debate.

No, he arguments used by Marxist to avoid reality is that genuine change can only come through "revolution". My point is that real political change can come through real political action.

I'm not proposing that we come up with some sort of new "blueprint" for political change, but rather that we work with what we've got and develop a better paradigm as we go. Many "current vehicles" are indeed corrupt, but they're all we've got.

That's not much of a plan, of course, but then as I said, I don't have any great ideas on how to fix things. I just know that the old methods aren't working.

[Bud Struggle]

It's nice to see that at least someone here is trying to take a nuanced approach to politics. :blushing: Ahhh, I am quite the sweerest thing, though.


This board is kind of like a secular church, in which parishoners say the right words and listen to the sermons, but then go home and live their lives unaffected. That's another path I've been taking: reviewing the vast similarities between two utopian religions each started by an overachieving Jewish boy that had a hard time fitting in with society. One avec Dieu and one sans Dieu.

[Bud Struggle]

Every single country you mentioned practiced state capitalism not communism. I dont think you what communism is.

State Capitalism is what Communism looks like in "real life." You take Das Kapital, the Communist Manifesto and all the other Communist "how to" books and put them into practice--and you come up with the Soviet Union and Communist China and Cuba and Cambodia and whatever else is out there.

[Demogorgon]

"Hurts all of society" compared to what. Capitalism may not be fun, but it sure beats everything that's come before. And, unfortunately, the preponderance of evidence indicates that it's beats every contemporary alternative as well.

There are a lot of problems with the market, no doubt, and over the past couple hundred years, we've come up with all sorts of inventive solutions to try and soften its harder edges. But every time that some starry-eyed idealist has tried to completely junk the market, it's resulted in absolute disaster.Let's get more specific. What do we mean by junk the market exactly? Are we referring to particular markets or are we referring to capitalism, something that is not, in fact, synonymous with capitalism. Further down you talk of the market replacing feudalism, but that is nonsense, the market was already there in feudalism, just as it was in pre-feudal times, the nature of it changed as economic reality changed, but it was always there.

What was the change from feudalism to capitalism then? Basically it was a shift from a land centered economy to a capital centered one. The source of wealth and power changed from control over land to control over investment and the ability to direct corporations.

So with the abolition of capitalism we are not referring to abolition of the market per se, but rather the abolition of private control over capital, something that will fundamentally change the market. In truth there are three distinct markets. The Labour Market, the capital market and the market in goods and services. The first two are the problem, not really the third. Proponents of the market system like to cite the benefits of the third as justification for the system, but in truth they are trying to use it to camouflage the devastation wrought by the first two. So the first two have to go, but the third can remain. However so long as capitalism remains, they cannot go.


Being a starry-eyed idealist yourself, I have no doubt that you'll come up with all sorts of reasons for that; chief among them, no doubt, that it's all Stalin's fault and that "material conditions" were never right.Can you second guess what I will say so readily? Have I not already distanced myself from those on this board who will not think clearly or constructively?

It is true that the Soviet Union was not exactly ideal for Communism, but while it is pointless to play historical "what if" games, it is still worth wondering what may have happened had the New Economic Policy been continued and the USSR allowed to evolve more naturally. That aside, why should I make excuses for the Soviet Union? The problem with it, from Stalin onwards, was that it was a totalitarian dictatorship. Sure they called themselves Communist, by why should I associate with them? You identify with Social Democracy these days and previously had a link to the NDP in your profile (which, by the by, isn't exactly relevant either when it comes to Quebec). Should you therefore have to associate with thugs like Milosovic who liked to dress themselves in Social Democratic clothing?

The Communist movement has made mistakes in the past, but for heaven's sake, can we not learn from our mistakes?


Well, in the real world material conditions are rarely perfect, and when things are shitty, it's all the more important that economic systems actually preform. If your "socialism" can only function in the most ideal of circumstances -- as in, when the country is "developed" enough (whatever that means), when the population is "evolved" enough (talk about Orwellian...), when the leadership is "proletarian" enough, and most fantastically of all, when the rest of the world joins in (!) -- then you're no better than the libertarians, harping on about a vague utopia that can never come to pass.Given that I don't say most of that, does that apply to me? with all due respect, you are not the first or only person on this board to challenge orthodoxy. It is just that not all challenges lead to the rejection of Marxism.

Society is a lot more organic and adaptable than either you or the simplistic Communists here think. And any economic system has to recognise that. I don't advocate any utopia, nor will you ever see me doing so. I am perfectly aware of the fact that we need to adopt new economic policies for modern socialism.

In that regard I believe myself to be more pragmatic than yourself. Advocating a return to Post-War Social Democracy is pretty unrealistic itself. Social Democracy was as much a product of its material conditions (yep I do bring them up when needed) as any other system. You can't simply turn back the clock. If it worked so well, why did it fall down, how will you stop it falling again? And what will it take to bring it back? Bretton-Woods isn't returning. And nor are the big corporations going to let it come back. They are too powerful now. The eighties gave them the ability to expand their influence over elected institutions almost indefinitely. The Genie is well and truly out of the bottle in that regard.

Just look at Canada. Corporate funding and a dodgy electoral system are meaning a perpetual switch between the Liberal and Conservative parties, neither of which have Social Democratic policies and while the NDP will certainly raise the flag for the causes of ordinary people, and I wish them all the best there, when they get into power at the provincial level, they are soon bullied and cajoled into the same old neo-liberal policies. And as for the other nominally Social Democratic party, the Bloc, they are currently propping up the Conservative government!


[quote]
Largely, of course, that's because so much of capitalism is dependent of development. You need a certain technological and sociological base before you can have a true market exchange. I think pretty much everyone on this board would agree with that. But history shows more than that, not only does sufficient development invariably lead to some form of market economy, but once that transition happens, it can't be reversed.Market economies have existed for something like eight thousand years, they are not a product of capitalism. Talking about the market here is a red herring. Even if we grant that the market is not going anywhere, why accept the capitalism will stay?


Once the technology for capitalism exists, feudalism can no longer operate. It's not that the "bourgeois" "overthrew" feudalism, it's that feudalism ceased to be workable in a society that had materially transcended it.

Which is why the entire notion of "bourgeois revolution" is nonsensical to begin with. France had a revolution, but England didn't. Neither did Germany or Japan or a dozen other developed countries around the world. And yet every single one, in remarkably short order, transitioned to capitalism.
Naturally but the feudal powers dragged their feet and made progression akin to moving through tar. Only when there was revolution to sweep away the old power structure was progression able to speed up. Revolution took many forms. The country that moved fastest was Britain and particularly England. The Civil War and the execution of the King seriously changed the structure of power allowing much faster progression and the Glorious revolution and the rise of constitutional monarchy with the Hanovorian monarchs meant that the old power structure came to an end and development could move unimpeded.

As for the other countries you cite, what do you call the Meiji restoration in Japan? Or the Revolutions of 1848 across Europe (and Brazil) that forced the centers of political power (including in Prussia which went on to dominate the subsequently united Germany) to make huge concessions allowing the bourgeoisie to take full and unimpeded control of the economy?



The problem is he also came up with a lot of things surrounding that notion, like "iron laws" of history that are demonstrably false and a "labour theory" of value that's ludicrous on face.Really? It is fashionable to say that the LTV is wrong and I will freely admit to starting out a skeptic, but the more I look at the matter, the harder I find it to escape the conclusion that it is fact correct. It is impossible to plausibly separate the cost of production of a product from its value after all.



The days of anyone taking Marxism seriously have long since died, and they're not coming back. Sure, you can find a scattering of true believers if you look hard enough. For instance, there's this message board with something like 7,000 members (although only about 200 are actually active.
What about the rise of socialism again in latin America? Or indeed the fact that the Communist party was still able to get four and a half million votes in the last Japanese election? It is not dead yet. Only in North America and Australia is Marxism really counted out as a serious theory.


Marxism doesn't propose real solutions to hard questions, it proposes bypassing those problems by "revolting" against them. Instead of living in the world we have and squarely facing reality, the communist spends his political life obsessed with some vague "postcapitalist" utopia of empty platitudes and outlandish absolutes.No. One cannot simply change things by "revolting' but nor can one change things with any great degree of success without doing so. The need of revolution is to change societies power structure so that changes could be made. The policies needed to fix the world are enormously complicated and need to be discussed, however I do not believe they can be implemented by the current political structure. There are too many vested interests. If the structure could implement any policy at all, I would not advocate revolution, simply present my policies and hope they be adopted, but I do not think that to be possible. I will still do my best to come up with proper solutions to the world's problems, but I would be a fool if I did not recognise that there must be serious political change to implement them.


This board is kind of like a secular church, in which parishoners say the right words and listen to the sermons, but then go home and live their lives unaffected.

Sure it is. And many of the parishoners did not take kindly to my attempts to point that out. Hence my "excommunication". But this board is not exactly the epicentre of serious political thought, is it? It is fun for what it is. I enjoy debating in OI, and trying to explain economic issues to beginners in learning, but if you want serious left wing thought, this isn't really the place. I think it would be a shame if you were to judge the entire socialist left on the basis of this board.

[Bud Struggle]

But this board is not exactly the epicentre of serious political thought, is it? It is fun for what it is. I enjoy debating in OI, and trying to explain economic issues to beginners in learning, but if you want serious left wing thought, this isn't really the place. I think it would be a shame if you were to judge the entire socialist left on the basis of this board.

You think? For First World Communist millitancy, I think RevLeft is as good as it gets. RevLeft IS Communism for a good deal of Communist Community. Yea, there are a myrad of little "Parties" with little websites that nobody looks at and papers nobody reads--and for the most part all they do is snipe at each other, with an occasional jab at the "man." And there's also some exceedingly boring indepth Marxist sites. I've been looking, and there's not that much out there beyond that.

I belong to the Communist Party USA--and believe me RevLeft looks like the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard compaired to them. Interesting though, if you go back to the "Good Old Days of Communism" (20s to the 50s) in the US at least there was a lot of first rate thought going on in Communist circles.

Nope, this little band of brothers is just about all there is to represent Communism into the 21st century. :thumbup1:

[Edit] On rereading the above post, it seemd a bit more negative than I intended. This is a really good site to learn about Communism--yea there are the issues of "personalities" and teen angst, but for the most part Communism is discussed (outside of OI) in a completely reasonable and understandable fashion. Good learning and Politics sections, History, too. (I'm sure Science is good--I just don't get there often.) This place is well thought out and well laid out.

And really interesting stuff is going on here, too. Some Global Admin, Commie Club hot shot named Debra Arno (she doesn't visit OI, but seem to be the "Queen of Ban" so I better be careful what I say :)) has the fasinating idea of writing a book about a wonderful old Bolshevik named RedStar2000--THAT will be a really great story. Probably other stuff on here, too. So, RevLeft is a good place, it's just what Communism looks like in 2008 in the First World.

[Demogorgon]

Well hang on, most European Parliaments have Communists in them. Some members of the board will deny that they are "real" Communists, because apparently to be a "real" Communist you are not allowed to have success. But as I say, the fact remains that most European countries and also Japan have successful enough Communist parties that they are taken seriously as parties.

They are a tiny bit more significant than RevLeft I think.

[Bud Struggle]

Well hang on, most European Parliaments have Communists in them. Some members of the board will deny that they are "real" Communists, because apparently to be a "real" Communist you are not allowed to have success. But as I say, the fact remains that most European countries and also Japan have successful enough Communist parties that they are taken seriously as parties.

They are a tiny bit more significant than RevLeft I think.

They also have Fascist Parties that are taken even more seriously in many cases as Parties. That doesn't make them "for real." The Parlementary (as opposed to the American Fedreral system) does allow for a lot of various finge elements of one sort or the other--but being in "the government" kind of lets "Communists" out of the loop as far as as being in any way "Revolutionary." They are just over the top Social Democrats.

On the other hand you have a good point--my view (unfortunately) is exclusively American--and this country something of a desert when it comes to any progressive thinking.

[apathy maybe]

But ACTUAL women's breasts have never been discussed. They were used in a metaphor for Liberty and Justice.

Here's a little RevLeft story about metaphor: In a PM exchange with a solid Communist here of longstanding (no names, of course) I ended a PM saying, "Please be kind during the Revolution."

The Communist then responded (not kidding) about the distance between our respective locations, what I would have to do to not get killed, and who to actually watch out for.

Nice person and all of that--but deadly serious about everything.

And that a lot of what I see here.

It occurs to me that this may well of been me. Here is the PM that I sent, after Tom asked me not to kill him during the revolution.

Dude, you are no where near me. There is at least an ocean between us. I won't be having anything to do with you during the revolution.

That said, I don't personally think that all the actual owners of stuff will get killed, only those that actively resist, and fight back.

So yeah, if you hand over the keys of your factories to the workers, hopefully they'll leave you alone.

(But you had better watch out for the Leninists...)

am.
Those who actually know me are going to realise that I wasn't being deadly serious (I really do like have a bit of fun). I was just saying, don't fight, and there is no reason to be fought.

More to the point, I am in no way a "communist". I'm not even an anarcho-communist. So yeah...

So yeah.

Sorry Tom, I've outed who you were conversing with :lol:.

[Bud Struggle]

It occurs to me that this may well of been me. Here is the PM that I sent, after Tom asked me not to kill him during the revolution.

Those who actually know me are going to realise that I wasn't being deadly serious (I really do like have a bit of fun). I was just saying, don't fight, and there is no reason to be fought.

More to the point, I am in no way a "communist". I'm not even an anarcho-communist. So yeah...

So yeah.

Sorry Tom, I've outed who you were conversing with :lol:.

Well, than my apologies to you....

Wanna be friends? :p:lol:

[apathy maybe]

Well, than my apologies to you....

Wanna be friends? :p:lol:

I told you, I don't be "friends" with auth scum...

[Bud Struggle]

I told you, I don't be "friends" with auth scum...

It was a JOKE! :lol:

[apathy maybe]

It was a JOKE! :lol:

:rolleyes: I know it's a fucking joke!

Christ on a stick! (Did I ever mention my idea of selling edible 'christ on a cross' things? Eat god, tasty. Of course, the Catholic already eat god, but they don't eat him on a cross...)

But face it, I'm just too cool (:cool:) to hang out with cappie scum, 'cause baby, I'm an anarchist :blackA::reda:.

:ninja:

(Sorry Jazzflaps, you can split and trash, or split and reactionary talk this crap now.)

[Bud Struggle]

:rolleyes: I know it's a fucking joke!

Christ on a stick! (Did I ever mention my idea of selling edible 'christ on a cross' things? Eat god, tasty. Of course, the Catholic already eat god, but they don't eat him on a cross...)

But face it, I'm just too cool (:cool:) to hang out with cappie scum, 'cause baby, I'm an anarchist :blackA::reda:.
.

Actually, you are pretty cool--and the funny thing is rich Bourgeoise are Anarchists, too. In a really odd way, They live the Anarchist life because after you make a certain amount of money in this world--everything is "free." You pay for it, of course, but money ceases to e a consideration for anything. You just go and get what you want. Want to take ten people out to a real expensive dinner? it doesn't matter how much it costs you just do it. Want a boat or a Ferrarri? you just get one. Whatever you want is "free" because the price of things doesn't matter at all. And they can do what that want when they want.

But, it is a "private" Anarchy, it applies only to each individual Bourgeois and no one else. Your Anarchy applies to the whole world--which in the end is the better way.

Maybe your Anarchy should keep the Red :reda: and the Bourgeoise the black :blackA:.

Just a suggestion.:)

[apathy maybe]

Anarchists will not give him the time of day for obvious reasons (authoritarianism, etc etc). They all dislike him, and yet the people who were there loved him.

The truth is that his system was an unusual, but very modern and clever mix of seemingly opposed elements: one-party state and democracy (workers self-management), socialism and free market mechanisms, dictatorship and anarchism (workers councils).

Most importantly, it worked for the people.
Well, yes, as an anarchist I dislike Tito and his system. However, before I was an anarchist, the Yugoslav system, of worker control etc. looked damn fine to me (compared to other examples in Eastern Europe). If I'm looking for a state socialist system, then yes, what happened in Yugoslavia was damned good. And it was a damn shame that it all fell apart (which I would suggest would partly have to do with the political system, which obviously wasn't perfect, as you mention).


Actually, you are pretty cool [thanks -ed]--and the funny thing is rich Bourgeoise are Anarchists, too. In a really odd way, They live the Anarchist life because after you make a certain amount of money in this world--everything is "free." You pay for it, of course, but money ceases to e a consideration for anything. You just go and get what you want. Want to take ten people out to a real expensive dinner? it doesn't matter how much it costs you just do it. Want a boat or a Ferrarri? you just get one. Whatever you want is "free" because the price of things doesn't matter at all. And they can do what that want when they want.

But, it is a "private" Anarchy, it applies only to each individual Bourgeois and no one else. Your Anarchy applies to the whole world--which in the end is the better way.

Maybe your Anarchy should keep the Red and the Bourgeoise the black .
I suggest that you still haven't fully grasped the idea of anarchism. Basically it is no hierarchy, not "freedom to do what you want without consequence". Yes, it is about freedom, but freedom through not having another above you.

As such, saying that the present capitalists are practising anarchism as individuals is as absurd as saying that during feudal times kings were anarchists.

(And the :A: symbol, no matter the colour, is an anarchist symbol. Being black is part of the fun. And if you look at mine, I've got green as well (environmentalism).)

[Bud Struggle]

I suggest that you still haven't fully grasped the idea of anarchism. Basically it is no hierarchy, not "freedom to do what you want without consequence". Yes, it is about freedom, but freedom through not having another above you.

As such, saying that the present capitalists are practising anarchism as individuals is as absurd as saying that during feudal times kings were anarchists.

(And the :A: symbol, no matter the colour, is an anarchist symbol. Being black is part of the fun. And if you look at mine, I've got green as well (environmentalism).)

Trust me, I have no one above me. No issues there. The rest, is just fine. We Bourgeois do what we want, no one tell us what to do. We live as we please. Laws are for the "other people."

Nope, I and my friends are Anarchists--the Black :blackA: is ours. You can keep your Red :reda: and your Greens. :lol:

[communard resolution]

Trust me, I have no one above me. No issues there. The rest, is just fine. We Bourgeois do what we want, no one tell us what to do. We live as we please. Laws are for the "other people.

He obviously meant that in anarchism, no one has anyone above them, not just a selected few.

In Pasolini's '120 Days Of Sodom', one character says "we Fascists are the real anarchists", which kind of mirrors the sentiment of your post. But it's hardly an accurate description of anarchism, and you know it.

[Schrödinger's Cat]

Fascists also stated their system was more democratic than democracy. ;) I don't want to make any implications, but...

[LSD]

Let's get more specific. What do we mean by junk the market exactly? Are we referring to particular markets or are we referring to capitalism, something that is not, in fact, synonymous with capitalism.

Well, capitalism actually is synymous with capitalism, since they're the same word. But, for the purpose of this discussion, I'm going to assume that that was a typo and you meant to say that the market is not synonymous with capitalism. And you're right, the market is a specific economic phemonenon. Actually, it's not even that, it's more of an academic convenience; a way to describe complex economic phenomena in simple understanable language.

The word "market", after all, is a metaphor. It's meant to evoke images of public squares and open shops; vast throngs of buyers and sellers moving throughout some massive fair ground. In reality, the "market" is just human beings buying and selling things, back and forth, back and forth.

Capitalism is obviously much more than that. But at it's core, it really isn't. Capitalism is a recent invention, but it's foundations, it's underpinnings, are actually quite old. Capitalism is nothing more than the market made paramount -- made supreme.

The market existed prior to capitalism, but it existed as a secondary, or even tertiary, economic factor. Capitalism gave it legs, it gave it strength and, eventually, an institutional and ideological foundation to rest on. None of that was by design, obviously, but was an inevitable result of technological development and social evolution.




Further down you talk of the market replacing feudalism, but that is nonsense, the market was already there in feudalism, just as it was in pre-feudal times, the nature of it changed as economic reality changed, but it was always there.

The market may have existed in feudal times, but it took a backseat in economic affairs. The prime mover of feudal economies was politics, regional, familial, and otherwise. People bought and sold, so obviously a market existed, but primary economic decisions were based on interpersonal bonds of filial loyalty and social association. And the vast majority of economic relationships were not based in capital. How could they be? The accounting practices and technical expertise needed for that level of interaction hadn't been developed yet.

The ancient romans bought and sold too, after all, but that didn't make them capitalists. The Roman empire, in its proto-mercantilist expansion, exemplified the thriving antiquarian society, and modeled economic policy for the next two thousand years of western history. Capitalism is nothing more than the latest stage of this evolutionary process, the refined product of a very old formula.

I have no doubt that that formula will continue to change and evolve as times wears on, but so long as resources are finite a market will be needed to manage them. Absent that pressure, we can start talking about the next stage of development. But we're not nearly there yet.


So with the abolition of capitalism we are not referring to abolition of the market per se, but rather the abolition of private control over capital, something that will fundamentally change the market. In truth there are three distinct markets. The Labour Market, the capital market and the market in goods and services. The first two are the problem, not really the third. Proponents of the market system like to cite the benefits of the third as justification for the system, but in truth they are trying to use it to camouflage the devastation wrought by the first two. So the first two have to go, but the third can remain. However so long as capitalism remains, they cannot go.

And you exactly do you propose getting rid of one without the other? Absent the capital market there is no market for goods and services. The whole point of capitalism is that every component of production is put up on the same open market. That's not "camouflage", it's the basic fucking idea!

You can try and disect the market, cutting out the pieces you don't like, but what you'll end up with won't be a living breathing economy, it'll be a moribound and hopelessly lopsided monstrosity. Something, in fact, not that distinct from the failed experiments of eastern Europe.

The USSR, after all, was itself an experiment of manipulating markets -- control the currency, regulate the labour pool, redistribute the procedes. The market never left the USSR, neither did capitalism. The bosses just swapped their suits for party badges and took off where they left off. Only now the market was "controlled", now capital was "public".

That's the bennefit of working with a 160 year old theory, it's been tested many many times. We don't need to speak in hypotheticals. We know what happens when we try and implement "abolition of private control over capital". In the best cases, we get a frozen despotism like Cuba, in the worst, we get a mass graveyard like Cambodia.

Human society's not a computer program to be optimized by removing unelegant code. There are a lot of aspects to capitalism that are ugly, but they're there because they're nescessary.




It is true that the Soviet Union was not exactly ideal for Communism, but while it is pointless to play historical "what if" games, it is still worth wondering what may have happened had the New Economic Policy been continued and the USSR allowed to evolve more naturally.

Obviously neither of us can know the answer to that question, but my bet is that Russia would have turned into something very much its neighbours, a socialistic but market-oriented state. It might well have borrowed from Germany's fine example and developed a robust industrial economy.

All of that, however, presumes a rational and praeternaturally sensitive mind guiding the Kremlin. In reality, leaders are not so prescient. Rather they are moved by ghosts and fantasies and they bend the world to their imaginings. Too much power, too few hands. The historical circumstances almost don't matter, the Soviet Union was doomed to failure by its basic nature. A system based on such iron rigidity cannot stand for long; it must ineveitably collapses under the weight of its own contradiction.

You seek to remake the market into some sort of "better" more humane version of itself. But that kind of grand social restructuring requires enormous control. It requires manipulation of virtually every facet of every economic arrangement on the planet. With that kind of vast sweeping influence, one may well be able to produce a more humane form of capitalism. but it would a far less human one.

'Cause the human beings living in it would no longer be able to live their lives absent perpetual "guidance" from their "friends" watching above; caged birds singing wonderfull melodies full of contentment and peace and happiness.

If that's your dream, it's a common one. But then the benevolent dictator has always been the prince of men.


You identify with Social Democracy these days and previously had a link to the NDP in your profile (which, by the by, isn't exactly relevant either when it comes to Quebec).

I don't know, they came to my door the other day insisting that I vote for their man (or woman in this case). I doubt they're going to win this riding, I don't think it's gone anything but liberal in a hundred years, but they're giving it all they've got.

I suppose they hope another Outremont will boost their presence. It'd certainly be fun to see, and another NDP MP woudln't hurt either. ;)


The Communist movement has made mistakes in the past, but for heaven's sake, can we not learn from our mistakes?

Sure we can! And as a first step in that direction we should dump all this "communism" stuff. That crap's done with. We're not trying to build communes here, or to resurrect Marx's ghost, so why stick with long discredited ideas?

If there's anything useful in the communist analysis, we can siphon it out, and put it to better use. Personally, I'm not convinced that there's even anything worth saving. But in any case, the solutions don't lie in dusty manuscripts or ancient tomes, they're in the concerted analysis of the here and now.


In that regard I believe myself to be more pragmatic than yourself. Advocating a return to Post-War Social Democracy is pretty unrealistic itself. Social Democracy was as much a product of its material conditions (yep I do bring them up when needed) as any other system. You can't simply turn back the clock.

I'm not advocating turning back the clock, on the contrary, I'm advocating we advance it, rapidly!

That we move capitalism forward as quickly as possible, that we develop and expand as fast as we can so that we may develop the tools we need to solve the very real problems we do face. But limiting the market isn't "turning back the clock", you can't clump together all market hindrances into one big basket and label that "social democracy". I suppose in your mind you can gather that basket and throw the whole mess out into the mist of yesterday's economic fumbles, but no, the real world isn't nearly that simple.

The social democracy of the 40s can't be recreated, no, but the social democracy of the future hasn't been envisaged yet. All that we are talking about are mechanisms, put in place to manage the interaction of thousands of cross-purposes per second. As our capacity to compute grows, so does our ability to process, it's a self-sustainining inexorable process and eventually, we will reach a point at which all of this will be moot.

But we're not there yet, and in the interim, we're forced to live with the best of the available options.


Bretton-Woods isn't returning. And nor are the big corporations going to let it come back. They are too powerful now. The eighties gave them the ability to expand their influence over elected institutions almost indefinitely. The Genie is well and truly out of the bottle in that regard.


And a new genie will emerge to combat him. Capitalism is nothing but change. In this case, maleability is an advantage. The market will adjust to the situation, and we will go on with our lives. Meanwhile economic strength must be counterbalanced with political might. At present, the scales are a tad tilted, our effort should be to rectify that.

Not to overthrow society, but to restore balance.


Just look at Canada. Corporate funding and a dodgy electoral system are meaning a perpetual switch between the Liberal and Conservative parties, neither of which have Social Democratic policies

And yet social democratic policies have been enacted. We have socialized health care, we have socialized police services. We have a vast centralized government machine in the business of redistributing wealth. We even have outright transfer payments, that is money from provinces with much to those with little. Whole government bureaucracies dedicated to nothing other than giving away someone ele's money.

But somehow I'm to believe that that's all part of the conspiracy, that the "bourgeoisie" is merely "compromising" with me so that they may secure their "rule". Don't you see how ludicrous that all sounds? How fantastical?

The working class isn't getting paid offf, it's getting paid. For doing their jobs. You know, wage labour and all that. It's how the system works. Someone needs a job done, someone pays someone to do it. Capital exchange, labour for hire. Don't overload it with mystical properties or supernatural importance, it's just business, same as any other.




Only when there was revolution to sweep away the old power structure was progression able to speed up. Revolution took many forms. The country that moved fastest was Britain and particularly England. The Civil War and the execution of the King seriously changed the structure of power allowing much faster progression and the Glorious revolution and the rise of constitutional monarchy with the Hanovorian monarchs meant that the old power structure came to an end and development could move unimpeded.

The reason the revolution was called "glorious" was due to its lack of bloodshed. It wasn't a propper revoltion in any sense of the word. The people didn't rise up to establish utopia on earth, rather a collection of noblemen secured their investments. And the throne was overcome and the process continued unhindered.

But there was never a class war in Britain, in that heart of industrialization, there were no communes or workers' revolts. Which might suggest that communism and anarchism and all this kind of radical shake-the-world's-foundation -ism has more to do with emotion alienation than it does with economics and capital.

'Cause politics is about much much more than class.


As for the other countries you cite, what do you call the Meiji restoration in Japan?

I call the Meiji restoration a successfull coup d'etat. I call Japan's subsequent development inevitable. Neither qualifies as a "revolution" in the Marxist sense of the word, unless we're re-writing the lexicon.

Communist schollars love to try and recaricaturize eastern development as following a strictly Marxist path, but that's just poor imitation,

I guess the Chinese just aren't as intelligent as old Marx. They just don't realize that the entire world "must" have followed Europe's developmental pattern, despite the fact that they ...didn't.

Now you can reinterpret and redefine as much as you want, the fact remains there was no "bourgeois revolution" in England, or in Japan, and yet they both developed some very functional capitalist economies. It would appear that the "class war" synthesis didin't quite apply there ...or to Germany, or China, or the rest of Asia really, or Africa of course, or North America actually, or even Europe...

In fact nowhere, was class the single determing factor of human relations. It was often important, sometimes supremely so, but at other times, it was decidely junior.

Unsurprisingly, human beings are a tad more complicated than a one word answer.


Really? It is fashionable to say that the LTV is wrong and I will freely admit to starting out a skeptic, but the more I look at the matter, the harder I find it to escape the conclusion that it is fact correct. It is impossible to plausibly separate the cost of production of a product from its value after all.


Personally, I dread the idea of delving into a discussion on the deep details of marxist economic theory. I would imagine you would as well, not only because such a prospect would be so boring as to drive both of us to immediate suicide, but also because at some level you must realize that the LTV has always been the weakest link of Marxist theory. That, ultimately, "scientific socialism" is hardly deserving of the label.

But then that was always Marx's selling point. Remember, Marx came out of the 19th century tradition of deterministic Newtonian romanticism. He really believed that he could come up with a set of "iron laws" of socialism with nothing more than his mind and a steady pen.

And good for him, that kind of cocky inflexibility is at the heart of all great innovations. But cockiness is not a substitute for accuracy and Marx's "solution", for all its, um, length, falls far far short of reality.

The fact is labour is not the source of value! It's an element of value, certainly, but all value most certainly does not "flow" out of the semi-devine fingertips of "proletariat". Value is not a property of matter, it is a social attribute and one which is entirely subjective. Which is why, for 150 of trying, Marxist "economists" are still running in circles trying to explain why the pound of dirt I spend three months digging out of the ground isn't worth the sum of my labour expenditures.

I don't profess to know the answers to the great economic questions, but I do know that Marx didn't know them either. And so does everyone else who's picked up an economics textbook in the last hundred years.

What about the rise of socialism again in latin America?

What about it? I I thought in your paradigm, social democracy was dead? And yet, here they insist on popping up! Seems like there's a flaw in your design, perchance. Maybe the braces aren't as strong as you thought they were?


No. One cannot simply change things by "revolting' but nor can one change things with any great degree of success without doing so.

In other words... do what you can.

[RebelDog]

Well, capitalism actually is synymous with capitalism, since they're the same word. But, for the purpose of this discussion, I'm going to assume that that was a typo and you meant to say that the market is not synonymous with capitalism. And you're right, the market is a specific economic phemonenon. Actually, it's not even that, it's more of an academic concenience; a way to describe complex economic phenomena in simple understanable language.

The word "market", after all, is a metaphor. It's meant to evoke images of public squares and open shops; vast throngs of buyers and sellers moving throughout some massive fair ground. In reality, the "market" is just human beings buying and selling things, back and forth, back and forth.

Capitalism is obviously much more than that. But at it's core, it really isn't. Capitalism is a recent invention, but it's foundations, it's underpinnings, are actually quite old. Capitalism is nothing more than the market made paramount -- made supreme.

The market existed prior to capitalism, but it existed as a secondary, or even tertiary, economic factor. Capitalism gave it legs, it gave it strength and, eventually, an institutional and ideological foundation to rest on. None of that was by design, obviously, but was an inevitable result of technological development and social evolution.

So it can be ditched.


The market may have existed in feudal times, but it took a backseat in economic affairs. The prime mover of feudal economies was politics, regional, familial, and otherwise. People bought and sold, so obviously a market existed, but primary economic decisions were based on interpersonal bonds of filial loyalty and social association. And the vast majority of economic relationships were not based in capital. How could they be? The accounting practices and technical expertise needed for that level of interaction hadn't been developed yet.

The ancient romans bought and sold too, after all, but that didn't make them capitalists. The Roman empire, in its proto-mercantilist expansion, exemplified the thriving antiquarian society, and modeled economic policy for the next two thousand years of western history. Capitalism is nothing more than the latest stage of this evolutionary process, the refined product of a very old formula.

I have no doubt that that formula will continue to change and evolve as times wears on, but so long as resources are finite a market will be needed to manage them. Absent that pressure, we can start talking about the next stage of development. But we're not nearly there yet.

At least you agree without that without markets economic power is historically useless and without power markets are economically 'surplus to requirements'?


And you exactly do you propose getting rid of one without the other? Absent the capital market there is no market for goods and services. The whole point of capitalism is that every component of production is put up on the same open market. That's not "camouflage", it's the basic fucking idea!

You can try and disect the market, cutting out the pieces you don't like, but what you'll end up with won't be a living breathing economy, it'll be a moribound and hopelessly lopsided monstrosity. Something, in fact, not that distinct from the failed experiments of eastern Europe.

The USSR, after all, was itself an experiment of manipulating markets -- control the currency, regulate the labour pool, redistribute the procedes. The market never left the USSR, neither did capitalism. The bosses just swapped their suits for party badges and took off where they left off. Only now the market was "controlled", now capital was "public".

That's the bennefit of working with a 160 year old theory, it's been tested many many times. We don't need to speak in hypotheticals. We know what happens when we try and implement "abolition of private control over capital". In the best cases, we get a frozen despotism like Cuba, in the worst, we get a mass graveyard like Cambodia.

Human society's not a computer program to be optimized by removing unelegant code. There are a lot of aspects to capitalism that are ugly, but they're there because they're nescessary.What you allude to is what a ruling class does to survive. Why should markets and capitalism be anything other than these things? What is necessary in your book is also what is good for the ruling class, how can that ever be morally squared? You (unfortunately maybe) find yourself in an epoch of history where power is dominant through our economic institutions of production and you feel these narrow beliefs constitute human relations and reality. Such a state of affairs is to be deplored, not promoted falsely as true human relations. Why do most humans reject this? Because the market destroys the weak and empowers the rich and is a pathetic reflection of actual need based on what the powerful want.

[Die Neue Zeit]

*snip*

I'd like to note, regarding RevLeft's Social-Fascist #1's (ever_closer_union being Social-Fascist #2) inability to distinguish between the various types of markets.


The market existed prior to capitalism, but it existed as a secondary, or even tertiary, economic factor. Capitalism gave it legs, it gave it strength and, eventually, an institutional and ideological foundation to rest on. None of that was by design, obviously, but was an inevitable result of technological development and social evolution.

This is in reference to the consumer goods market only. The bourgeois capitalism, in addition to elevating the consumer goods market, created the labour and capital markets.

BTW, you have no right to edit RebelDog's post.

[Demogorgon]

Before I reply, I would like to make one simple respect. I will address your points based on nothing other than what you have said, I ask that you do me the same kindness. You are attacking views that I do not hold. I have been very clear that I have no interest in simply repeating dogma and wish to get to the bottom of any given issue using whatever methodology is most appropriate. I am a Marxist because I broadly agree with Marx, not because I regard his word as divine truth. I will happily disagree with him where I think he was wrong. So do not presume I believe anything if I have not said that I do. Now, let's get to the reply.
Well, capitalism actually is synymous with capitalism, since they're the same word. But, for the purpose of this discussion, I'm going to assume that that was a typo and you meant to say that the market is not synonymous with capitalism. And you're right, the market is a specific economic phemonenon. Actually, it's not even that, it's more of an academic convenience; a way to describe complex economic phenomena in simple understanable language.

The word "market", after all, is a metaphor. It's meant to evoke images of public squares and open shops; vast throngs of buyers and sellers moving throughout some massive fair ground. In reality, the "market" is just human beings buying and selling things, back and forth, back and forth.

Capitalism is obviously much more than that. But at it's core, it really isn't. Capitalism is a recent invention, but it's foundations, it's underpinnings, are actually quite old. Capitalism is nothing more than the market made paramount -- made supreme.This isn't accurate and is based on a misunderstanding of what we mean by the market. The market describes the process by which prices and quantities produced and sold of goods is decided through buying and selling as well as the way in which resources are allocated. It does not work as smoothly as its proponents think it does for a variety of reasons we don't need to get into here. But broadly speaking that is the best definition we can come up with. It is not anything new. It has existed for as long as there has been economic activity beyond simple exchanges within tribes. Slave based systems had markets every bit as much as capitalism does, not least in slaves, the price of which varied according to market forces, as did feudal societies where the price of goods and services, not to mention labour (amongst freemen) both of which worked as they do now.

It is not true to say that capitalism makes the market system paramount. Indeed it limits it in a number of ways in which pre-capitalist societies did not. Contrary to what the markets most fanatical proponents will tell you, it in fact works best under capitalism when there is plenty of control and correction being exercised by the Government. I will mention some of this as we go on.


The market existed prior to capitalism, but it existed as a secondary, or even tertiary, economic factor. Capitalism gave it legs, it gave it strength and, eventually, an institutional and ideological foundation to rest on. None of that was by design, obviously, but was an inevitable result of technological development and social evolution.

No, it was not the main factor in the economy, control of land was. However the market is not the main factor under capitalism either, control of capital dominates there. However in day to day terms, the market mattered greatly under feudalism because it determined the prices of goods and services. Just as it does now. The notion of capitalism being the "market system" is an utter fiction put forward by those with no knowledge of history.


The ancient romans bought and sold too, after all, but that didn't make them capitalists.Indeed, to reiterate again, ancient Rome was not a capitalist society but it had a market economy. See what I am saying?


And you exactly do you propose getting rid of one without the other? Absent the capital market there is no market for goods and services. The whole point of capitalism is that every component of production is put up on the same open market. That's not "camouflage", it's the basic fucking idea!
Hardly, one doesn't need to look into the future or come up with some constructed version of the distant past to find a means of eliminating one kind of market without getting rid of the others. A free market in goods and services without a free market in capital is hardly a revolutionary concept. It is simply the post war economic policies of Japan and South Korea. I do not say that to imply that I am endorsing their economic policy, it was superior in certain ways to that adopted in Western Europe and North America, but hardly perfect. I simply cite it to show that it was possible.

Much has been written about the Japanese investment structure if you are interested, but to some it up, the level of investment in the economy each year was (and to a large extent still is) decided by the Government that was then filtered through regionally and farmed out to the firms according to the wishes of the Government and the banks (that were Government allied). The firms were locked into hierarchical contracts with one another meaning that investment could not be farmed out in such a way as to change what the Government and the banks controlling each "cluster" had intended. In short there was no free market in capital but there was a very fre market in goods and services. I do not say this to endorse that system, obviously I do not, I am simply trying to demonstrate that it is possible to separate out different kinds of markets.

You can try and disect the market, cutting out the pieces you don't like, but what you'll end up with won't be a living breathing economy, it'll be a moribound and hopelessly lopsided monstrosity. Something, in fact, not that distinct from the failed experiments of eastern Europe.Hardly. Point me to a country that doesn't alter the market to some extent or another and I will be impressed.


The USSR, after all, was itself an experiment of manipulating markets -- control the currency, regulate the labour pool, redistribute the procedes. The market never left the USSR, neither did capitalism. The bosses just swapped their suits for party badges and took off where they left off. Only now the market was "controlled", now capital was "public".Sure. I have said the same myself. And manipulating the market in that way was in no way different in any meaningful sense from what capitalist economies do. Indeed controlling and manipulating the currency is a key feature of capitalism, far more so than it was in pre-capitalist times. Again we are hardly talking about a uniquely free market system here. Some economists (on all sides of the political spectrum) will argue that the success with which an economy operates will come down almost entirely to how well the government controls the supply of money.


That's the bennefit of working with a 160 year old theory, it's been tested many many times. We don't need to speak in hypotheticals. We know what happens when we try and implement "abolition of private control over capital". In the best cases, we get a frozen despotism like Cuba, in the worst, we get a mass graveyard like Cambodia.Or the extraordinary economic growth of Japan. Japan had private ownership of capital of course, but not private control in any meaningful success, the Government decided how it was directed. I advocate neither the Cuban nor Japanese method, but why presume that all attempts other than Japan will go the way of Cuba?


Human society's not a computer program to be optimized by removing unelegant code. There are a lot of aspects to capitalism that are ugly, but they're there because they're nescessary.
They are there because they are intrinsic to capitalism, and they may well be necessary to capitalism, but they are not necessary to the economy. Capitalism and the economy are not synonymous, the economy did not spring into being with capitalism, nor will it vanish with its passing.

Capitalism did not sweep away every part of the economy that already existed and neither will Communism. We know that we will still have an economy in a post-capitalist society and we know aspects of it will continue to function as before. For that reason we need to try and understand capitalism and work out how a new economic system can eliminate the bad bits while keeping the new bits.


All of that, however, presumes a rational and praeternaturally sensitive mind guiding the Kremlin. In reality, leaders are not so prescient. Rather they are moved by ghosts and fantasies and they bend the world to their imaginings. Too much power, too few hands. The historical circumstances almost don't matter, the Soviet Union was doomed to failure by its basic nature. A system based on such iron rigidity cannot stand for long; it must ineveitably collapses under the weight of its own contradiction.It would not have required a saint in the Kremlin, simply one that was not a dictator. The government under the New Economic Policy was probably the most "liberal" (in the loose sense of the word) that Russia has ever had.


You seek to remake the market into some sort of "better" more humane version of itself. But that kind of grand social restructuring requires enormous control. It requires manipulation of virtually every facet of every economic arrangement on the planet. With that kind of vast sweeping influence, one may well be able to produce a more humane form of capitalism. but it would a far less human one.I don't seek to make a more humane version of capitalism, I seek to remove it. Rather to create a more humane economy. Such change will require much less control than you think, but that aside, do you realise how much central control capitalism requires? Who controls the supply of money, directs subsidies, provides for policing and defense, provides the social welfare to prop the system up and collects the taxes to pay for all of this?

It is perhaps the most basic rule of economics that there will have to be control and management. This is not a problem so long as the entity carrying out this management is democratic.


If that's your dream, it's a common one. But then the benevolent dictator has always been the prince of men.

Quite, but you will never see me advocating such a thing.


I don't know, they came to my door the other day insisting that I vote for their man (or woman in this case). I doubt they're going to win this riding, I don't think it's gone anything but liberal in a hundred years, but they're giving it all they've got.Sure, and Conservatives come to my door at election time. Doesn't change the fact that they have less chance of being elected here than my pet dog!


I suppose they hope another Outremont will boost their presence. It'd certainly be fun to see, and another NDP MP woudln't hurt either. ;)

It certainly wouldn't. The NDP are certainly a good opposition party.

Jack Layton is one of the best opposition leaders in the world, but I don't suppose he would be that good a Prime Minister. That is the point, it is not that his policies are bad, just that he would come up against a brick wall should he have the chance to try and implement them.


[quote]
I'm not advocating turning back the clock, on the contrary, I'm advocating we advance it, rapidly!

That we move capitalism forward as quickly as possible, that we develop and expand as fast as we can so that we may develop the tools we need to solve the very real problems we do face. But limiting the market isn't "turning back the clock", you can't clump together all market hindrances into one big basket and label that "social democracy". I suppose in your mind you can gather that basket and throw the whole mess out into the mist of yesterday's economic fumbles, but no, the real world isn't nearly that simple.Here is a good example of you presuming I believe something that I do not believe. By turning back the clock, I refer to it being a pipe drunk that the welfare state can be reconstructed as once it was. I don't like that fact one bit, but I cannot escape it. Some modern version of Social Democracy might be possible. There are some encouraging signs here in Scotland, but as of yet, I remain a skeptic. It simply will not be as possible due to changing economic and political circumstances to bring things back to the way they once were. The post war period was a historical anomaly. It was quite extraordinary that such social welfare provisions were able to be enacted and income inequality actually fell. But it broke down. I would love to see such things return, but we need something more robust than social democracy. We need full blown socialism.


And a new genie will emerge to combat him. Capitalism is nothing but change. In this case, maleability is an advantage. The market will adjust to the situation, and we will go on with our lives. Meanwhile economic strength must be counterbalanced with political might. At present, the scales are a tad tilted, our effort should be to rectify that.

Not to overthrow society, but to restore balance.
How do we do that? It is very rare for elected institutions to be able to match the economic powers in influence. Indeed it is a defining characteristic of polyarchy (which is what Western society is) that there be a priviliged class whose power matches or exceeds that of elected officials. You can't simply change that.


And yet social democratic policies have been enacted. We have socialized health care, we have socialized police services. We have a vast centralized government machine in the business of redistributing wealth. We even have outright transfer payments, that is money from provinces with much to those with little. Whole government bureaucracies dedicated to nothing other than giving away someone ele's money. These things are not necessarily social democracy though, are they? Hong Kong has Universal Healthcare and extensive Social Welfare, is it a Social Democracy? To be sure, Canada has had a strong Social Democratic tradition and the Liberal party was Social Democratic under Trudeau.

Really though, are these things adequate? Canada is really not to bad as capitalist countries go, but ultimately the wealth gap is still rising. And that means society is on the downward slope unfortunately.


But somehow I'm to believe that that's all part of the conspiracy, that the "bourgeoisie" is merely "compromising" with me so that they may secure their "rule". Don't you see how ludicrous that all sounds? How fantastical?
This I think might be exhibit B when it comes to my accusation that you are presuming I hold views that I do not Obviously Social Democracy is a compromise. I doubt anybody would actually deny that. But it isn't a sinister one. If you support it, you are not being sucked into a conspiracy, just settling for for a dead end solution to a much bigger problem.

The working class isn't getting paid offf, it's getting paid. For doing their jobs. You know, wage labour and all that. It's how the system works. Someone needs a job done, someone pays someone to do it. Capital exchange, labour for hire. Don't overload it with mystical properties or supernatural importance, it's just business, same as any other.

I ascribe no mystical qualities to it, it is what it is. However it is unfair and it is exploitative. Misery and poverty are not coming out of nowhere.


The reason the revolution was called "glorious" was due to its lack of bloodshed. It wasn't a propper revoltion in any sense of the word. The people didn't rise up to establish utopia on earth, rather a collection of noblemen secured their investments. And the throne was overcome and the process continued unhindered.With all due respect, I think you are countering what you expect me to say rather than what I am saying. The Glorious revolution did not mark a great change in society, it was a flash point that removed a political impediment to a slower underlying change to the economic structure. That is, in truth, what revolutions are. I do not know if you ever believed in a mass uprising that would achieve utopia, I think you are too intelligent to believe in that in fact, but whatever you believed in, I do not believe in such a thing. The Glorious Revolution is a better example of a bourgeoisie revolution than the French Revolution in fact because it was a much more down to earth thing. It was a political change that was necessary to allow economic change to continue. I do not know what a revolution is to you, but that is certainly what it is to me.


But there was never a class war in Britain, in that heart of industrialization, there were no communes or workers' revolts. Which might suggest that communism and anarchism and all this kind of radical shake-the-world's-foundation -ism has more to do with emotion alienation than it does with economics and capital.Well actually there were, but that is not the point. Change is more "Steady as she goes" than that. Revolution is about achieving political change to allow economic change to take place. The romanticism attached to it here is just teenage dreaming.


I call the Meiji restoration a successfull coup d'etat. I call Japan's subsequent development inevitable. Neither qualifies as a "revolution" in the Marxist sense of the word, unless we're re-writing the lexicon.You probably know what I am going to say here, given what I said about the Glorious Revolution. But it is worth looking at this in some detail so as to emphasise my outlook.

Prior to the Meiji restoration, Japan was a feudal state, with an interesting difference, the Emperor was only ceremonial head. Real power belonged to the Shogun, also a hereditary position. Anyway the economic and industrial development getting under way in Japan was being hampered by a medieval political system, so it needed to change. The Emperor took the chance. Contrary to the manner that some interpret it as, he did not make himself absolute monarch, but rather what was effectively an unelected President presiding over a European style parliamentary system. This change greatly opened Japan up allowing for the economic development that the bourgeoisie were pushing for. That was the revolution. The fact that it was the Emperor that planked its backside on the seat of power was entirely immaterial, what mattered was that there was the political change needed to allow for the economic change that took place.


The fact is labour is not the source of value! It's an element of value, certainly, but all value most certainly does not "flow" out of the semi-devine fingertips of "proletariat". Value is not a property of matter, it is a social attribute and one which is entirely subjective. Which is why, for 150 of trying, Marxist "economists" are still running in circles trying to explain why the pound of dirt I spend three months digging out of the ground isn't worth the sum of my labour expenditures.The reason that such an effort has no value is that nobody wants the proceeds of it. It is not hard. Again as I say, the exchange value of a good is based upon its cost of production and all costs, except that of virgin land are labour costs.

Indeed, it is worth pondering if the value of Virgin Land is not entirely artificial anyway. It would not cost anything without the market distortion of private property.


What about it? I I thought in your paradigm, social democracy was dead? And yet, here they insist on popping up! Seems like there's a flaw in your design, perchance. Maybe the braces aren't as strong as you thought they were?

If you are right and what is happening in Latin America is in fact Social Democracy, why should that bother me? If it turns out that Social Democracy is alive and that it can work, why should I be upset? It would show change to be easier than I thought. Hardly a cause for misery. But I do not think the new progressive movements in Latin America to be Social Democratic. Simply taking power by peaceful means does not mean that your changes are not revolutionary.


In other words... do what you can.
And when that is not enough you seek means of achieving more.

[jasmine]

The Glorious Revolution is a better example of a bourgeoisie revolution than the French Revolution in fact because it was a much more down to earth thing. It was a political change that was necessary to allow economic change to continue. I do not know what a revolution is to you, but that is certainly what it is to me.

I'm interested in how you apply this idea to the Russian revolution. It seems to me you can plausibly apply it to the February revolution but I don't see how it fits with the October revolution. The October revolution was a supremely conscious act - ditching of the slogan of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, April Theses, dispersal of the constituent assembly and so on. Indeed Trotsky believed that the October revolution could not have happened without Lenin.

The Bolsheviks did see themselves as the conscious expression of inevitable historical development but, looking back over 90 years later, it seems they were wrong.

Did Russia require the October revolution for its economic development? Could this not have happened under the auspices of a Menshevik government?

Also it's hard to see how the idea of an underlying, developmental, economic mechanism can be applied to post 1945 eastern Europe. Political, military and subjective economic judgements caused the Soviet Union to uproot and transform the economies. Were these driven by some relentless, impersonal, economic mechanism that dictates human history?

And generally, the 20th century seems to me to have confounded the idea that humanity is moving forward in a more or less orderly fashion. The property relations/modes of production in China, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea and so on (post revolution) didn't really fit any orderly theory of human development. Obviously we have much more information about this period than about the Roman empire and it may be that the past is much more messy and open-ended than our text books make it seem.

[Die Neue Zeit]

The Mensheviks and the SRs were too cowardly to take power. Either the Bolsheviks took power, or the Russian empire-turned-republic would've fragmented even moreso than the Soviet breakup, losing the east to Japan, Central Asia to various imperialist powers, the Caucasus to Britain, huge chunks of European Russia to Germany and/or Poland, etc.

[LSD]

You know, I really did think this was going to be shorter post. Somehow it never works out that way. I wonder if I have a problem...


Before I reply, I would like to make one simple respect. I will address your points based on nothing other than what you have said, I ask that you do me the same kindness. You are attacking views that I do not hold.

What I'm doing is attacking views I think you hold. I'm certainly not trying to misrepresent your positions. It can get a bit tricky on the net, though, to tell one person's post from another's; and in any case, it's always difficult to discern nuanced political ideas from brief samples.

I hope, though, that I'll avoid misrepresenting you in the future; though doubtfully I'll extrapolate incorrectly at times, and you must always forgive the occasional rhetorical hyperbole. But I certainly have no interest in caracterizing your views as anything other than they are.

God knows I don't need more Marxists mad at me! :lol:

If anything, I'm encouraged by people such as yourself who seem to hyold somewhat pragmatic (we'll get into the somewhat part later) views. It certainly beats the hard core Marxist "class traitor" line!

And if there's any hope for the radical revolutionary left, it's gotta be in people like you who are willing to deconstruct much of the paradigm.

But, glowing flattery aside...

*Gloves off*

This isn't accurate and is based on a misunderstanding of what we mean by the market.

I don't know who "we" is supposed to refer to in that sentence, but it can't possibly include me since that would nescessitate a self-contradiction. That just leaves two possibilities, one, that you were refering to yourself in the royal third person plural -- which I'll reject as too ridiculous and pretentious -- or you were refering to yourself and some unnamed consensus.

It's that unnamed party that this basically comes down to, the common parlance definition of the market. Now, I notice that despite your accusing me of "misunderstanding" the meaning of a fairly simple word, you failed to provide a definition of your own. I'm left therefore to conclude that either you don't have one, or you just assume that it goes without saying. Personally, I was abiding by the latter, but given the direction of this conversation, it's becoming clear that things are not as transparent in that direction as one might hope.

So how about we clear this whole mess up right now:

The market describes the process by which prices and quantities produced and sold of goods is decided through buying and selling as well as the way in which resources are allocated.

That's your shorthand description of the market, and it's a decent one, despite several bizarre grammatical errors. But the word market comes from the same root as merchant and merchandise. A market was a place where people would buy and sell products. The modern metaphor isn't so much an aphorism as it is a recognition that that's still what we do today

'Cause, fundamentally, the market has not changed in 6,000 years. Supply, demand, greater than, less than; these are the founding blocks of civilizations. It's economics that breathes life into the nile delta, it's counting. Numbers and markets and pieces of cloth.

All very abstract notions, all very seperated from physical labour. You see, even here, at the beginining of time as it were, there was already a seperation between the physical and the economical. Fringe types love to date the collapse of the "true" economy to when currency stopped being backed by precious metals, but the truth is that it's been open right from the start.

Governments and entities can meddle with it and hamper it -- and quite effectively too! -- but no one was ever able to eliminate it. Because, ultimately, people are going to want things, and they're going to use the tools at their disposal to do so. All that capitalism presumes is that they'll make a rational purchasing choice, something which obviously isn't guaranteed, but which nonetheless is at the basis of all social theory.

So that's the market! As I understand it at least, and as its understood by the majority of the english speaking world. The market is the instrument by which products of any type may be bought or sold.

In other words, human society.


It is not true to say that capitalism makes the market system paramount. Indeed it limits it in a number of ways in which pre-capitalist societies did not.

Pre-capitalist societies limited the market all the time, mostly unintentionally; but effectively nonetheless. And while the mechanisms in place were not nearly as sophisticated as their modern equivilents, a certain degree of intentional market manipulation occured as well.

It's actually rather ludicrous to assert that the market is particularly "limited" today, since we're presently experiencing the most dramatically unlimited trade market in all of human history (which is to be expected).

No, I think the word you were looking for was regulate; i.e., capitalism regulates the market in a way that precapitalist societies didn't. That is, it sets up laws and Commerce Boards and whole government deparments dedicated to watching and "correcting" the various economic markets. That's all true enough, of course, but it's a manifestation of the market's growing importance. And it is most certainly not a decline in reach.

It's odd, though, that you would say that capitalism "limits" the market, especially since you made a point of mentioning that "capitalists" say the opposite. Strikes me that capitalists should know a thing or two about their system and this whole "market" issue kinda seems a little FUNDAMENTAL.

I know! Let's consult the foundational document of capitalist economic theory.... or the manifesto of the Capitalist Party.... no, those don't exist, do they? No, Seems that the only books referencing capitalism seem to do so after the fact; seems that they describe the process already in motion. Well, that would be because capitalism isn't actually a thing, not in the sense that communism or socialism or even fucking Maoism are. And that's always been the problem for its competitors, leftist and rightist alike. You can't attack the ideologie 'cause there isn't any, and you can't attack the system 'cause it's funda-fucking-mental.

And that's the mess you're in here. The reason you can't take capitalism out of the market is that it is the market. That's all it is, no ideology, no politics, no nothing.

Capital from the latin caput meaning head: in general parlance, wealth, income, and pretty much anything of fungible value.

Capitalism, from the capital with an -ism stuck at the end: Karl Marx's name for modern economics.

Not only is the market the paramount factor in capitalism, it's the only factor! Capitalism is the market, with all the other bullshit removed. The reason the ancient Romans weren't capitalists isn't that they did too little, it's that they did too much. It's that their market, impressive as it was, was secondary to the overwhelming primacy of the hierarchical caste structure.

Absent that caste system -- and given a generous allowance for technological development -- the Roman Empire would be indistinguishable from what we call capitalism. Obviously that coud never have happened, social development is a gradual proces occuring in concert with technological change... but it is interesting to remember that the basic economic underpinnings of capitalism are actually quite simple. They just require a robust social structure willing to support it.

'Cause ancient rome really couldn't have dealt with all the nuances of modern currency economics, not to mention issues of investment. Much simpler to just have the rich families wear purple. Oh, and how about they all be related to each other?

Of course all that sort of outsider ex cathedra "social contract" nonsense is just that; but it's a means of explaining and justifying the system that's developed around us. And that system, for better or worse, has aquired the particular label of "capitalism". And that would be the market, regulated, and "limited" though it may be.

And, no, you can't seperate the two.


No, it was not the main factor in the economy, control of land was.

You really can't assert independence from Marxist thinking and then regurgitate stock Marxist clichés. It's confusing.

Feudalism was not a "stage of development", neither was it "nescessary" or "inevitable" or have anything to do with "means of production" or even really that much to do with "land".

I mean, yeah, land was involved in the sense that it was owned by feudal lords. But then so was a lot of stuff, including much more fungible commodities that could be, and were, routinely traded on the open markets. What made it feudalism and not capitalism, though, was the fact that these markets were open only to those who happened to be of the right genetic stock -- or somehow associated with another who was.

'Cause that's what feudalism was ultimately all about, relationships. Loyalty, reciprocal and reserve. It formed the key transition point between the aristocratic nations of antiquitarian/midieval europe and the states of modernity. The end of feudalism was an essential point in the dismantling of the vast mountain of crap that had accumulated economic development, and over the next several hundred years, the markets would be progressive opened more and more until eventually, finally (although not quite) we reach today. Today wherein the markets about as open as they can get and have expanded to their maximum reach.

Marx just got it wrong, he reversed the impetus and oversimplified the equation. His model might be compelling in its simplicity, but it's just plain wrong. Nowhere is that more evident, of course, than in the pathetic attempt by east Asian Marxists to discover the feudal stage of their development that they just know must be there.

Feudalism was a unique (although not particularly original) feature of middle-age Europe. It was a result of the Catholic Church and the collapse of the Roman Empire. In many ways it did help contribute to the early foundations of capitalism as we know it today.

But this Marxist conception of the "feudal stage" is complete and utter crap.


However the market is not the main factor under capitalism either, control of capital dominates there.

And that means ...what? "Control of capital"? What the fuck is that? Seriously, can't you at least try to make your arguments cogent. I understand among "revolutionaries", "control of capital" is accepted as a stock phrase. But what does it actually mean?

Specifically, what distinguishes this phenomenon "control of capital" from the phenomenon known as the market?

Because for me, and I'm pretty confident in saying the majority of planet earth too, those two concepts are one in the same. Capital is controlled by people in the market. The market is the place wherein people control capital. Capital, in the market, is controlled. Controlling of capital is done in the market.

So what was your point again?


A free market in goods and services without a free market in capital is hardly a revolutionary concept. It is simply the post war economic policies of Japan and South Korea.

So in your mind, the post-war asian markets constitute some sort of post-captialist economy? Really? Well ...OK, then. I guess Marx was wrong, we don't need revolution after all! all it takes is a devastating war, western occupation, and lots of foreign cash.

Except that maybe what happened wasn't so much post-capitalist as it was ...capitalist, as in every possibly meaning of that word. The free market persisted, capital persisted, and basically pretty much everything stayed the same.

So I honestly have no fucking clue what in the world you're on about! :scared:

The Japanese government took a rather heavy handed approach to market managment, South Korea less so. Hong Kong even less. That's why those three made for such interesting economic research papers back in the 70s. They each took distinct yet successful routes towards modern capitalist development. But in all three cases, it was capitalism all the same.

Japan's approach did indeed involve a great deal of government intervention, especially in areas concerned with foreign trade. But, to borrow your words, "control of capital" remained in private hands. The market may have been hampered, but it was very much alive.

apan in the 1950s and 60s was a vibrant example of successful government intervention; and I agree that it's a useful counterpoint to the failed "socialist" attempts at market hampering.

But did it ever occur to you that the reason the Japanese succeeded whereas the "socialists" failed, was because they weren't trying to "develop" some sort of mystical post-captalist production scheme? The reason the USSR couldn't just copy Japan's example (aside from the practical issues) was that the Marxist theory it was founded on wasn't about hampering markets or regulating industry; it was supposed to be about "revolution" and something called "communism" that would be achieved after "socialism" which would be..... what again?

It was the ideology that tripped them up. What the USSR ended up with was a kind of bastardized social democracy, minus the democracy part. State-run industries across the board, but a de facto open market for everything else; and a really open market if you happen to know the right pakhan.

And so slowly, awkwardly, capitalism came to russia all dressed up in red clothing. Which is why it really didn't take that much in '92 to knock the whole mess down.

All of this you know, at some level. And somewhere deep down you must recognize that capitalism isn't going anywhere in our lifetime. You have ideas, maybe even some good ones. But they're about how to modify capitalism, not replace it.

'Cause actually replacing capitalism would require a complete reworking of society on a gargantuum scale. Such an enterprise would risk massive collatoral damage ...oh wait, it already did.


I don't seek to make a more humane version of capitalism, I seek to remove it. Rather to create a more humane economy. Such change will require much less control than you think, but that aside, do you realise how much central control capitalism requires? Who controls the supply of money, directs subsidies, provides for policing and defense, provides the social welfare to prop the system up and collects the taxes to pay for all of this?

Yeah, and that's all in this relatively unregulated free market sociery! Imagine what would happen if you actually tried to implement a planned economy. :ohmy:


It is perhaps the most basic rule of economics that there will have to be control and management. This is not a problem so long as the entity carrying out this management is democratic.

I would think that the "most basic rule of economics" would be supply and demand, but I suppose the need for control fits in there somewhere.

But surely you must realize that there's a stark difference between the kind of control nescessitated by a liberal social democracy, and the kind nescessitated by a "full blown socialist" state. The former requires a government, yes; but the latter requires a bureacracy of infinitely higher proportion. The social democratic government operates in concert with a free economic market, the "socialist" government replaces that market, and in so doing takes on the responsibility for doing everything that the market would otherwise do.

It's no coincidence that "socialist" states have been universally oppressive and universally corrupt. It's not some sort of "accident" or "bourgeois conspiracy". It is rather a direct result of the nescessarily supreme role that the state must take in any socialist society.

You people love talking about how the "workers' state" will somehow be "different" from the bourgeois one, it's kind of like how the early Soviets used to prattle on about the "new man" they'd created. But there was no "new man" and there is no "workers' state" somehow magically protected from the corruptions of power.

Democracy is about more than elections, it's about checks and balances. Fundamentally, it's about checking and balancing the power of the government itself. In capitalist countries, the market is that ultimate check. And so when the government supplants the market, that check disappears.

That's why socialism's never worked, that's why it never will. Forget "material conditions", forget the "revolution betrayed" or "workers' state degenerated". The theory itself is flawed, always has been.

So it's about time you get a new one.


The post war period was a historical anomaly. It was quite extraordinary that such social welfare provisions were able to be enacted and income inequality actually fell. But it broke down. I would love to see such things return, but we need something more robust than social democracy.

It didn't "break down", it was broken down. Contrary to the assertions of the Margaret Thatchers of the world, there was nothing "inevitable" about the regression of the 1970s and 80s. Rather it was the result of a concerted and well-organized effort to undo the social and economic policies that the welfare state had spent the previous three decades constructing.

Many conservatives take a bizarrely determinist approach to economics, believing that somehow the liberalization of the market is something akin to a "force of nature". it's not actually that unlike communist's obsessive belief that communist revolution "must" eventually occur.

But neither position is correct. The future is what we make it, nothing more, nothing less. There are no guiding spirits or "iron laws" shaping the world around us. I realize that the whole social democracy thing was rather disheartening to those who took Marx's fatalist approach to history seriously. The choice was supposed to be "socialism or death", even the idea of another option was nothing short of heresy!

That's why the members of the second international are still vilified as "traitors" to the revolution. That's why, 80 years later, people are still ranting about Karl Kautsky and Edward Bernstein. There are members of this board who were born literally fifty years after Kautsky died who nonetheless hold a hatred of him so passionate as to make Hitler blush. These people's grand-parents were toddlers when Kautsy was an active social democrat ...and yet they still rant and rave of his "treachery" against the "proletariat".

That kind of emotion only comes from a very deep wound, and the wound that social democracy dealt communism was a fatal one. It proved that the central conceit of the Marxist paradigm, the assertion on which the entire ideology is predicated -- i.e., "class war" -- was in fact optional. And once people realized that the alternative to socialism wasn't "barbarism" (and once they started to see socialism in practice, of course), the Communist Parties of the world found it harder and harder to peddly their bullshit.

Communism's not quite dead yet ...but it's getting pretty close. You've still got Cuba and North Korea (lucky you), and China sort of. But in terms of a serious option for the working class of the world? It's not even a question.

Your time is long over.


We need full blown socialism.

Sorry, but "full blown socialism" doesn't work.


These things are not necessarily social democracy though, are they? Hong Kong has Universal Healthcare and extensive Social Welfare, is it a Social Democracy? To be sure, Canada has had a strong Social Democratic tradition and the Liberal party was Social Democratic under Trudeau.

If social welfare isn't social democratic, what is it? It's certainly not "liberal" in the classical sense of that word. Nonetheless it's a feature of every liberal republic. No one denies that the first world is solidly capitalist, and yet the first world also has some of the most extensive and comprehensive government subsidized welfare policies in the world. In many places, they're being cut back on, or have been already. But they are nonetheless undeniably present, and undeniably accepted.

That is, aside from fringe radicals that no one takes seriously, virtually nobody questions the existance of a massive government welfare structure existing side by side with a capitalist economic system. For most people, there's no conflict there. It's not "class war", it's not the "bourgeoisie" "compromising" with a "radical" "proletariat"; it's just a free market, and public social programmes.

It's just social democracy.


Really though, are these things adequate? Canada is really not to bad as capitalist countries go, but ultimately the wealth gap is still rising. And that means society is on the downward slope unfortunately.

So lets work on changing that. Not through firey rhetoric and empty platitudes about "revolution", but through real honest political work.

I know it's not glamorous, and God knows it's no fun, but it just might do some real good. And that's something that for all its bluster and arrogance ,"communism" has never managed.


The Glorious Revolution is a better example of a bourgeoisie revolution than the French Revolution in fact because it was a much more down to earth thing. It was a political change that was necessary to allow economic change to continue. I do not know what a revolution is to you, but that is certainly what it is to me.

Perhaps, but it most certainly is not what a revolution was to Karl Marx.

I never denied that the glorious revolutution was a revolution in the popular sense of that word, in the sense that the industrial revolution was a revolution or that the microchip revolution was. What I contended rather, was that from a Marxist perspectice, from a "historical materialist" one, it was not. It wasn't "class war" and it wasn't France.

The glorious revolution didn't precipitate economic restructuring, it reflected an economic change which had already occured. If "class war" were truly the guiding force of history, however, that economic change should not have been able to take place absent a conflict between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. That conflict never took place.

Instead, the glorious revolution actually increased the power of the aristocracy (for a time). It eliminated the role of the absolute monarch (something which never really fit well into historical materialist theory), which was an important change in the history of britain and civilization in general. But it was most certainly not the epic clash between a reactionary aristocracy and an ascendent bourgeoisie that Marxist theory predicts.

Marx's approach to history works very well ...for France. Where it fails is everywhere else. Face it, Marx may have been a very smart man, but he was a terrible historian.


The reason that such an effort has no value is that nobody wants the proceeds of it. It is not hard. Again as I say, the exchange value of a good is based upon its cost of production and all costs, except that of virgin land are labour costs.

No, the exchange value of a good is based on its subjective value. To use your own words it's based on whether "[anybody] wants ... it". The more people that want it, the more its worth. It's called marginal utility, and it's been understood for a pretty long time now.

The only people who still insist that goods have absolute objective values are fools still caught up in deprecated 19th century rubbish.

You know, people like you. ;)


If you are right and what is happening in Latin America is in fact Social Democracy, why should that bother me?

It shouldn't.

[Demogorgon]

I'm interested in how you apply this idea to the Russian revolution. It seems to me you can plausibly apply it to the February revolution but I don't see how it fits with the October revolution. The October revolution was a supremely conscious act - ditching of the slogan of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, April Theses, dispersal of the constituent assembly and so on. Indeed Trotsky believed that the October revolution could not have happened without Lenin.

The Bolsheviks did see themselves as the conscious expression of inevitable historical development but, looking back over 90 years later, it seems they were wrong.

Did Russia require the October revolution for its economic development? Could this not have happened under the auspices of a Menshevik government?

Also it's hard to see how the idea of an underlying, developmental, economic mechanism can be applied to post 1945 eastern Europe. Political, military and subjective economic judgements caused the Soviet Union to uproot and transform the economies. Were these driven by some relentless, impersonal, economic mechanism that dictates human history?

And generally, the 20th century seems to me to have confounded the idea that humanity is moving forward in a more or less orderly fashion. The property relations/modes of production in China, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea and so on (post revolution) didn't really fit any orderly theory of human development. Obviously we have much more information about this period than about the Roman empire and it may be that the past is much more messy and open-ended than our text books make it seem.

You have to appreciate that revolutions are longer running things. The October Revolution in Russia was part of a process that began with the February Revolution and didn't really conclude until the end of the civil war. It was in short a specific event in the process of revolution rather than a revolution in its own right. It was necessary because the Government established by the February Revolution was ineffective and something more capable had to come in.

As I say, Revolution is a process not an event. I have talked about the Glorious Revolution, but in truth that was a process over a number of years. It did not end with the deposition of King James. It probably wasn't really over until after the Hanoverian monarchs took the throne.

[Demogorgon]

I don't know who "we" is supposed to refer to in that sentence, but it can't possibly include me since that would nescessitate a self-contradiction. That just leaves two possibilities, one, that you were refering to yourself in the royal third person plural -- which I'll reject as too ridiculous and pretentious -- or you were refering to yourself and some unnamed consensus.

It's that unnamed party that this basically comes down to, the common parlance definition of the market. Now, I notice that despite your accusing me of "misunderstanding" the meaning of a fairly simple word, you failed to provide a definition of your own. I'm left therefore to conclude that either you don't have one, or you just assume that it goes without saying. Personally, I was abiding by the latter, but given the direction of this conversation, it's becoming clear that things are not as transparent in that direction as one might hope.

So how about we clear this whole mess up right now:


That's your shorthand description of the market, and it's a decent one, despite several bizarre grammatical errors. But the word market comes from the same root as merchant and merchandise. A market was a place where people would buy and sell products. The modern metaphor isn't so much an aphorism as it is a recognition that that's still what we do todayTo be honest, I am not that interested in the etymology of the word. The meaning of a word is based on how we use it. And in economics we use the word "market" to mean the process of determining prices and quantities of goods and how we allocate resources.


'Cause, fundamentally, the market has not changed in 6,000 years. Supply, demand, greater than, less than; these are the founding blocks of civilizations. It's economics that breathes life into the nile delta, it's counting. Numbers and markets and pieces of cloth.Quite so, it long predates capitalism, which is what I mean about the "market" and "capitalism" not being synonymous.


All very abstract notions, all very seperated from physical labour. You see, even here, at the beginining of time as it were, there was already a seperation between the physical and the economical. Fringe types love to date the collapse of the "true" economy to when currency stopped being backed by precious metals, but the truth is that it's been open right from the start.Well precious metals have nothing to do with the matter. Truth is that Government backed Fiat Currency can do everything that gold backed currency can do with the added bonus that it is far more flexible. So we need not concern ourselves with such issues.


Governments and entities can meddle with it and hamper it -- and quite effectively too! -- but no one was ever able to eliminate it. Because, ultimately, people are going to want things, and they're going to use the tools at their disposal to do so. All that capitalism presumes is that they'll make a rational purchasing choice, something which obviously isn't guaranteed, but which nonetheless is at the basis of all social theory.I think you are somewhat mistaken here for two reasons. Firstly there is the simple matter of clearing up that mainstream economists no longer presume that people will always make rational choices. That supposition has wrecked their models for goodness knows how long, so for the most part they have wisely abandoned it. More importantly you are still making the mistake of conflating markets and capitalism. I think your problem is that you are insisting on seeing things like capitalism, feudalism and socialism as individual entities rather than points on a scale.


Pre-capitalist societies limited the market all the time, mostly unintentionally; but effectively nonetheless. And while the mechanisms in place were not nearly as sophisticated as their modern equivilents, a certain degree of intentional market manipulation occured as well.

It's actually rather ludicrous to assert that the market is particularly "limited" today, since we're presently experiencing the most dramatically unlimited trade market in all of human history (which is to be expected).What exactly do we mean here about limiting the market? You say that feudalism limited the market in a number of ways. You presumably mean that rigid social structures, aristocratic dominance and whatnot limited it. Okay, I actually agree with this, but the trouble is that many will argue that those were simply the reality of society at a time and the market functioned around them rather than being distorted by them. That isn't my view of course, I agree with what you say, or at least what I think you are saying, but I also follow this logic through to its conclusion which is that capitalism is also heavily limiting the market before we even get to regulation through social stratification.


No, I think the word you were looking for was regulate; i.e., capitalism regulates the market in a way that precapitalist societies didn't. That is, it sets up laws and Commerce Boards and whole government deparments dedicated to watching and "correcting" the various economic markets. That's all true enough, of course, but it's a manifestation of the market's growing importance. And it is most certainly not a decline in reach.The market's importance is the same as it ever was. The fact that there is more regulation now is a manifestation of improved understanding of economics.


I know! Let's consult the foundational document of capitalist economic theory.... or the manifesto of the Capitalist Party.... no, those don't exist, do they? No, Seems that the only books referencing capitalism seem to do so after the fact; seems that they describe the process already in motion. Well, that would be because capitalism isn't actually a thing, not in the sense that communism or socialism or even fucking Maoism are. And that's always been the problem for its competitors, leftist and rightist alike. You can't attack the ideologie 'cause there isn't any, and you can't attack the system 'cause it's funda-fucking-mental.There isn't an ideology, it is simply the way the economy currently works. But I can certainly attack that.


And that's the mess you're in here. The reason you can't take capitalism out of the market is that it is the market. That's all it is, no ideology, no politics, no nothing.Trying to pin down capitalism to a specific definition is going to be difficult, but if I were to try, I would say it describes a system where control of capital resources is fundamental to power and prestige within the system. It may not be the best definition, but its a stab at it. Anyway it does not describe all economic activity. What I am trying to emphasise above all else is that capitalism is not the economy, it is just one form that the economy can take. Did everything change in economic terms with the appearance of capitalism? Will everything change when it goes?


Capital from the latin caput meaning head: in general parlance, wealth, income, and pretty much anything of fungible value.

Capitalism, from the capital with an -ism stuck at the end: Karl Marx's name for modern economics.In economics, we mean capital to refer to one of the three basic resources. The other two being land and labour. Capitalism describes the system where capital is pre-eminent in deciding what happens in the economy. I think what you are doing, whether intentional or not, is trying to give capitalism such a broad definition as to encapsulate absolutely everything. Well if you want to do that, we will have to talk about having a completely different kind of "capitalism" rather than abolishing it. But that just seems silly to me.



You really can't assert independence from Marxist thinking and then regurgitate stock Marxist clichés. It's confusing.

Feudalism was not a "stage of development", neither was it "nescessary" or "inevitable" or have anything to do with "means of production" or even really that much to do with "land".

I mean, yeah, land was involved in the sense that it was owned by feudal lords. But then so was a lot of stuff, including much more fungible commodities that could be, and were, routinely traded on the open markets. What made it feudalism and not capitalism, though, was the fact that these markets were open only to those who happened to be of the right genetic stock -- or somehow associated with another who was.Given technological capabilities of the day, land was the dominant factor of production, that is labour needed land above all else to achieve much. Agriculture being by far the most important industry. Which meant that those who held power were pretty keen to place themselves in charge of the land. That basic truth is where feudalism came from. The rest was basically window dressing.


And that means ...what? "Control of capital"? What the fuck is that? Seriously, can't you at least try to make your arguments cogent. I understand among "revolutionaries", "control of capital" is accepted as a stock phrase. But what does it actually mean?Who directs and controls the largest part of investment? Who owns the capital resources? You have there those that control capital.


Specifically, what distinguishes this phenomenon "control of capital" from the phenomenon known as the market?When I have finished writing this rather long post, I will probably take the dog out for a walk and stop off to buy some beer. I will be participating in the market when I do that, but I sure as hell won't be controlling capital.


Because for me, and I'm pretty confident in saying the majority of planet earth too, those two concepts are one in the same. Capital is controlled by people in the market. The market is the place wherein people control capital. Capital, in the market, is controlled. Controlling of capital is done in the market.The market is the place where people buy and sell beer. The companies producing beer are directed by the market. Control of these companies is done in the market. Are the market and beer the same thing?

Silliness aside, this goes back to what I said a few posts back about there being no monolithic "market" but rather specific markets that we can group under three main headers. The Capital market, The Labour market and the market in goods and services. The capitalism market is only part of the larger structure.


So in your mind, the post-war asian markets constitute some sort of post-captialist economy? Really? Well ...OK, then. I guess Marx was wrong, we don't need revolution after all! all it takes is a devastating war, western occupation, and lots of foreign cash.No they were capitalist economies without a free market in capital. Capital was still in private hands, but there was little free market. The point I was making was that any future socialist society is going to have to seek to do something similar, take control of investment out of control of the market (which is far too volatile, but rather than place control in the hands of a different set of elites as Japan did, albeit to considerable success, it will be subject to democratic control.

Similarly the Labour market too will have to be replaced so as people are not having to engage in a race to the bottom to sell their labour at the cheapest price. But a market in goods and services? I don't see that going anywhere.


The Japanese government took a rather heavy handed approach to market managment, South Korea less so. Hong Kong even less. That's why those three made for such interesting economic research papers back in the 70s. They each took distinct yet successful routes towards modern capitalist development. But in all three cases, it was capitalism all the same.Indeed, but they all worked differently and different policies achieved different degrees of success. The end of capitalism will not mean that the whole book of economics starts over, and as we will be in unknown territory, apart from having the Soviet Union as an excellent lesson in what not to do, we will have to look back at how capitalism systems worked, take the best bits from different versions and try to integrate it into a new non-capitalist system.

But did it ever occur to you that the reason the Japanese succeeded whereas the "socialists" failed, was because they weren't trying to "develop" some sort of mystical post-captalist production scheme? The reason the USSR couldn't just copy Japan's example (aside from the practical issues) was that the Marxist theory it was founded on wasn't about hampering markets or regulating industry; it was supposed to be about "revolution" and something called "communism" that would be achieved after "socialism" which would be..... what again?Maybe, but this is going back to what I have said about society being more organic. Japan shows that a non market approach to investment allocation works (albeit while still retaining capitalism), that is all I wanted to show. Socialists should be aware of this when we attempt to draw up new policies.


All of this you know, at some level. And somewhere deep down you must recognize that capitalism isn't going anywhere in our lifetime. You have ideas, maybe even some good ones. But they're about how to modify capitalism, not replace it.They are about trying to modify the economy. I know I keep saying this, but the economy and capitalism are not the same thing. Capitalism is an economic system in the same ways as children are human, but humans are not necessarily children and economies are not necessarily capitalist.

Now, I will grant you that there are a lot of people on this board that don't appreciate that either and in between "smash, destroy" rhetoric they harbor notions of a post-capitalist society simply being based on an infinite amount of everything and people simply gifting to one another or else bizarre notions about robots doing the work or whatever else. But I know that to be crap. I realise that we have to look at the economy as it is and accept economic laws as they are, rather than how we would like them to be. I realise we have to modify the economy and remove capitalism in this way. You might call that "modifying capitalism" and if I have not convinced you by now that it isn't, I am not going to, but whatever you call it, that is my outlook.


Yeah, and that's all in this relatively unregulated free market sociery! Imagine what would happen if you actually tried to implement a planned economy. :ohmy:

Where did I call for a planned economy? I ventured that the future may lie in a democratically planned system of resource allocation, but certainly didn't call for a fully planned economy.


But surely you must realize that there's a stark difference between the kind of control nescessitated by a liberal social democracy, and the kind nescessitated by a "full blown socialist" state. The former requires a government, yes; but the latter requires a bureacracy of infinitely higher proportion. The social democratic government operates in concert with a free economic market, the "socialist" government replaces that market, and in so doing takes on the responsibility for doing everything that the market would otherwise do.I do not believe so because, as i have said, socialism does not need to replae the market. It needs to replace capitalism. Too different things.


It's no coincidence that "socialist" states have been universally oppressive and universally corrupt. It's not some sort of "accident" or "bourgeois conspiracy". It is rather a direct result of the nescessarily supreme role that the state must take in any socialist society.The corruption came from political dictatorship. That tied in with tightly controlled economies of course, but if we want to look at the "socialist" societies that actually existed, look at Yugoslavia. For all the corruption that came with political dictatorship, did it have tightly controlled economy and a vast bureaucracy?
[uote]
You people love talking about how the "workers' state" will somehow be "different" from the bourgeois one, it's kind of like how the early Soviets used to prattle on about the "new man" they'd created. But there was no "new man" and there is no "workers' state" somehow magically protected from the corruptions of power.[/quote]Of course it will be different. ust as all sorts of states are different from others, the Canadian State is different to the American one, which is different from the British one, which is different from the Japanese one and so forth. Because a socialist state will change its economic focus away from that of the above listed states, it stands to reason that it will be different again.


Democracy is about more than elections, it's about checks and balances. Fundamentally, it's about checking and balancing the power of the government itself. In capitalist countries, the market is that ultimate check. And so when the government supplants the market, that check disappears.Well in a capitalist market, that means that democratic decision making is hampered by a wealthy elite. It is for this reason that I contend that capitalist societies cannot be democracies except in very specific circumstances and that the non-dictatorial ones are rather liberal polyarchies. Checks and balances on political power are vital, but they must be democratic checks and balances. There must be no privileged elite, able to direct the process to their own ends.


It didn't "break down", it was broken down. Contrary to the assertions of the Margaret Thatchers of the world, there was nothing "inevitable" about the regression of the 1970s and 80s. Rather it was the result of a concerted and well-organized effort to undo the social and economic policies that the welfare state had spent the previous three decades constructing.Okay, but things were plainly going wrong in the seventies. Not everywhere of course, but the fact was it was becoming apparent that social democracy was no silver bullet to capitalist malaise. More tellingly even in the places where social democracy was working and there was no concerted attempt to destroy it, such as in Sweden, it has still faded somewhat.

I have no ideological reason to hate social democracy. Were we talking in the fifties back when it looked like social democracy was to achieve much, I would probably be a social democrat rather than a Communist. Indeed my initial political instincts were very much towards social democracy. I take no great joy in having to conclude that it did not hold many answers.


If social welfare isn't social democratic, what is it?
Civilised.

Social welfare i a characteristic of a civilised society in the same way as gender equality, respect for people of different cultures and non-use of the death penalty are. Social Democrats push very strongly for social welfare, but have no monopoly on it, as it is simply a hallmark of civilised society. I mean, can you really claim that Hong Kong is a social democracy? Even leaving aside the fact that it isn't a democracy but anyone's standards, do the economics even look vaguely social democratic?


So lets work on changing that. Not through firey rhetoric and empty platitudes about "revolution", but through real honest political work.Okay, let's work on that. I too think we need something a bit more substantial than fiery rhetoric and do my best to come up with some real solutions. Solutions you are free to call simply modifying capitalism if you want, but socialist solutions nonetheless. We differ on how we think they can be achieved, I believe that we need real political change to be able to implement economic change, you apparently think we can achieve change within the present political structure, but let's not argue over that for now. And look for common ground. What policies do you think could combat this growing income inequality?


Perhaps, but it most certainly is not what a revolution was to Karl Marx.I think it was. Marx lived in Britain and did much of his research in the British library. He was well aware how the political and economic development here took place, probably knowing more about it than he did the French Revolution. I fear that you may have taken your view of Marx too much from this board where certain teenagers like to look for the blood thirst side of him (something I don't believe was there at all) and play it up. They ignore what he actually said about change in Britain.


I never denied that the glorious revolutution was a revolution in the popular sense of that word, in the sense that the industrial revolution was a revolutoion or that the microchip revolution was. What I contended rather, was that from a Marxist perspectice, from a "historical materialist" one, it was not. It wasn't "class war" and it wasn't France.
Well it was class war. You have to appreciate that class war does not have to mean gun fights on the street. Again the teenage angst brigade here like to think of it in terms of glorious combat, but that isn't what it is at all apart from a few specific circumstances. It is for that reason that I prefer to call it "class antagonism" rather than "class war", because there was a hell of a lot of antagonism involved in the glorious revolution. You sometimes see the religious side of it played up, but at its route, the Glorious revolution and subsequent events up to and including the Hanoverian monarchs and the birth of the modern British political system were in many ways about the bourgeoisie who had ben becoming more and more important and indeed, had been throwing their weight around since at least the civil war getting heartily sick of the fetters that the aristocratic political system was imposing on them and the restriction of freedom that they were suffering. The event of the Glorious Revolution was not significant for who it put on the throne, but rather for all the change that led to it and that it allowed to continue.

The glorious revolution didn't precipitate economic restructuring, it reflected an economic change which had already occured. If "class war" were truly the guiding force of history, however, that economic change should not have been able to take place absent a conflict between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. That conflict never took place.Yes it did. It just didn't take part in any romantic manner that you can make a good action movie out of. I was about to write that it wasn't violent conflict, but that isn't really true, there were plenty of arrests, tortures and executions involved not to mention a liberal sprinkling of riots, so it might be best to describe it as conflict that did not involve civil war. Revolution does not have to involve blood letting. Or at least not very much.


Instead, the glorious revolution actually increased the power of the aristocracy (for a time). It eliminated the role of the absolute monarch (something which never really fit well into historical materialist theory), which was an important change in the history of britain and civilization in general. But it was most certainly not the epic clash between a reactionary aristocracy and an ascendent bourgeoisie that Marxist theory predicts.Nah, Britain, or at least England never did have an absolute monarchy. Even the Anglo-Saxon kings were limited by the Witengamot. The Aristocracy always had huge influence over the king. James might have been misbehaving as far as the aristocracy were concerned and William and Mary were much better, but that was an insignificant part of royal politics that had been playing for decades. Rather the significant aspect was the manner in which Parliament was able to seize much control. A parliament where the lower house was dominated by the bourgeoisie. By the time George I came to throne, Parliament had achieved such power that the bourgeoisie dominated commons was able to wield huge influence over who became a minister. George of course did not have much intention of ruling, partly because he didn't speak English and partly because he recognised the changing times. instead he appointed a Prime Minister to govern for him, soon the increased power of parliament meant that the Prime Minister had to enjoy the confience of the Commons and the system of elected British Government (elected albeit only by wealthy male property owners) came into being.

This was revolutionary and came about through a lot of antagonism and conflict. The aristocracy didn't just give this to the bourgeoisie out of the goodness of their hearts.


Marx's approach to history works very well ...for France. Where it fails is everywhere else. Face it, Marx may have been a very smart man, but he was a terrible historian.

Not at all. I don't tend to read Marx in the French context at all, but almost entirely in the British context and he fits fine. You just have to accept he was not "old blood and guts" to get hi to fit.

Besides even if you are right about what he believed, that would just show that I in fact disagree with him. It wouldn't prove me wrong!


No, the exchange value of a good is based on its subjective value. To use your own words it's based on whether "[anybody] wants ... it". The more people that want it, the more its worth. It's called marginal utility, and it's been understood for a pretty long time now.Understood? How the hell do you measure utility? That is something that certainly isn't understood. The theory of marginal utility works fine because it is completely intangible and you can "prove" it by looking at the results and saying that the level of marginal utility involved must have been at just the right level for the theory to work. You certainly can't predict anything with it.

What you can predict is that things that cost more to produce tend to cost more to buy.

[pusher robot]

Understood? How the hell do you measure utility? That is something that certainly isn't understood.
What do you mean it isn't understood? Such quantifications are common.


The theory of marginal utility works fine because it is completely intangible and you can "prove" it by looking at the results and saying that the level of marginal utility involved must have been at just the right level for the theory to work. You certainly can't predict anything with it.

Of course you can. What may be confusing is that units of utility are undefined and arbitrary. But that's not an impediment to marginalism because in any application, those units cancel out of the equation. For example, if an apple is worth 10 units and an orange is worth 20 units, that simplifies to

2*APPLE= ORANGE

Notice that units of utility have completely disappeared from both sides. We don't really care about them at all, because all we REALLY care about is the relations between actual goods and services. The hypothetical existence of these units is postulated simply to explain the fact that the above equation is true only for certain values of APPLE and ORANGE, i.e., only at one point on a curve. By mapping out the changing ratios of APPLE to ORANGE, that curve demonstrates that something is causing the ratio to change in a roughly predictable fashion, and that "something" is marginal utility.

[jasmine]

It was necessary because the Government established by the February Revolution was ineffective and something more capable had to come in.


To clarify, before a reply, why exactly did something more effective have to come in? What is dictating what is necessary?

[Luís Henrique]

Here's a little RevLeft story about metaphor: In a PM exchange with a solid Communist here of longstanding (no names, of course) I ended a PM saying, "Please be kind during the Revolution."

The Communist then responded (not kidding) about the distance between our respective locations, what I would have to do to not get killed, and who to actually watch out for.

I hope he remarked that you shouldn't make jokes - we evil communists will send any people making jokes into the gulag.

Mbhwahbhwahhwahwahah...

This is a message board, and probably 80% of the "communists" here have never taken part on a workers strike, or indeed done anything that remotely resembles communist political activity*. Darnit, I even fear that a great lot of the "communists" here have never even met other communist in real life... ;)

So... take "us" less seriously, too...

*This seems to be the case, for instance, of LSD... he was a "communist" as long as he was never actually active as a communist. When he realised what it would be, he promptly rejected his views, and embraced capitalist apologism.

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

To clarify, before a reply, why exactly did something more effective have to come in? What is dictating what is necessary?

The people made the February Revolution to put an end to Russian participation on World War I. Yet the government set up by the February Revolution was unable to extricate Russia from World War I. This is the reason it also fell.

Luís Henrique

[Demogorgon]

What do you mean it isn't understood? Such quantifications are common.

Of course you can. What may be confusing is that units of utility are undefined and arbitrary. But that's not an impediment to marginalism because in any application, those units cancel out of the equation. For example, if an apple is worth 10 units and an orange is worth 20 units, that simplifies to

2*APPLE= ORANGE

Notice that units of utility have completely disappeared from both sides. We don't really care about them at all, because all we REALLY care about is the relations between actual goods and services. The hypothetical existence of these units is postulated simply to explain the fact that the above equation is true only for certain values of APPLE and ORANGE, i.e., only at one point on a curve. By mapping out the changing ratios of APPLE to ORANGE, that curve demonstrates that something is causing the ratio to change in a roughly predictable fashion, and that "something" is marginal utility.
And how are you going to do that? It is an utter fiction that you can measure how much somebody prefers one good over another. If I decide to buy ne brand of beer over another, can you tell me exactly the difference in marginal utility I would experience between the two? I certainly couldn't and I am the one going to be drinking them. How can anyone conceivably come up with the exact difference necessary to calculate anything? The best you can come up with in regard to utility is "more" and "less". Hardly useful for making any kind of accurate calculation. With that in mind, how are we supposed to check if marginalism is accurate when we cannot get acurate measurements to check?

[Demogorgon]

To clarify, before a reply, why exactly did something more effective have to come in? What is dictating what is necessary?

Because it was on the verge of collapse anyway. Sooner or later somebody would have to come along to fill the power vacuum. As it happens, it was the Bolsheviks.

[pusher robot]

And how are you going to do that? It is an utter fiction that you can measure how much somebody prefers one good over another. If I decide to buy ne brand of beer over another, can you tell me exactly the difference in marginal utility I would experience between the two?
I'm confused by this concept of being unable to measure how much somebody prefers one good to another. I mean, really? I can think of many simple ways to do just that. In the case of beer, we might ask how many beers of a brand you don't prefer it would take to get me to switch from the brand you do prefer, holding cost constant. If you can't decide, that simply means they are nearly perfect substitutes as far as you are concerned, in essence APPLE=ORANGE.


I certainly couldn't and I am the one going to be drinking them.
I simply don't believe this. You're asking me to believe that you can't tell the difference between good beer, mediocre beer, and terrible beer? That is, how much you prefer one beer to another? Not even objectively! Just personally! That's like saying it's impossible to have foods you like, foods you tolerate, and foods you hate. Or impossible to have a favorite color. I can't believe you really think this.


How can anyone conceivably come up with the exact difference necessary to calculate anything? The best you can come up with in regard to utility is "more" and "less". Hardly useful for making any kind of accurate calculation. With that in mind, how are we supposed to check if marginalism is accurate when we cannot get acurate measurements to check?

I don't understand why you think it's so difficult to get reasonably accurate figures. Haven't you ever played that game with your mates where you're at the bar, mix some horrible concoction, and see who's willing to do it for the lowest number of dollars or beers? That's exactly the mechanism at work. And somehow, people are able to arrive at exact numbers...

EDIT: Furthermore, even accepting your critique, "more" and "less" are perfectly useful to achieve any degree of accuracy so long as you are able to continually narrow the parameters. Haven't you ever seen the Clock Game? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_Game) Haven't you ever sat in front of a Phoropter?

[Self-Owner]

What do you mean it isn't understood? Such quantifications are common.


For what it's worth, he's actually right here. Mainstream economics rejects interpersonal utility comparisons as meaningless. As Demo said, the best you can do with regards to utility is 'more or less' - it is only meaningful in an ordinal sense, and with regard to the order of an individual's preferences. Of course, a lot of neo-classical economics uses the idea of a utility function, which does look as though it assigns cardinal utilities: but if you look closely, you see that this is just used a convenient fiction -they have to be equivalent up to monotonic transformations (i.e. transformations which preserve order).

[jasmine]

Because it was on the verge of collapse anyway. Sooner or later somebody would have to come along to fill the power vacuum. As it happens, it was the Bolsheviks.


As it happens? I wasn't asking for local, immediate reasons why the Menshevik government was replaced but rather for broader, historical, economically-determined reasons that meant they had to be replaced by the Bolsheviks.

It seems that this is what your general, grand theory is suggesting. Perhaps there's a misunderstanding.

[pusher robot]

For what it's worth, he's actually right here. Mainstream economics rejects interpersonal utility comparisons as meaningless.

But he appears to be rejecting entirely personal utility comparisons, which seems absurd. You're right, but that's tangential to what I think we're talking about.

Suppose that for Alice, 5*BEER=WINE, and that for Bob, BEER=2*WINE. A given transaction is proposed, trading a beer for a wine. Their are 4 separate utilities at work: the utility of an additional beer to Alice, the utility of an additional wine for Alice, the utility of an additional beer for Bob, and the utility of an additional wine for Bob. You're right in that comparing, say, Alice's beer utility to Bob's beer utility is meaningless. But there's no reason to do that. The only information Alice and Bob need to decide whether they should agree to the exchange is their own utilities; if the exchange results in greater utility, then agree. If not, decline. They don't need any information at all about the other person's utilities in order to maximize their own.

[Demogorgon]

I'm confused by this concept of being unable to measure how much somebody prefers one good to another. I mean, really? I can think of many simple ways to do just that. In the case of beer, we might ask how many beers of a brand you don't prefer it would take to get me to switch from the brand you do prefer, holding cost constant. If you can't decide, that simply means they are nearly perfect substitutes as far as you are concerned, in essence APPLE=ORANGE.
Or how about I choose one beer one day, another the next day, or perhaps I am drinking heavily and get so drunk that I don't care what brand I drink and just go for the cheapest. How can you accurately measure the way marginal utility is changing? It doesn't hold still, so even if it were possible to measure it in a snapshot of time, you can't measure it over a certain period of time without extreme difficulty.


I simply don't believe this. You're asking me to believe that you can't tell the difference between good beer, mediocre beer, and terrible beer? That is, how much you prefer one beer to another? Not even objectively! Just personally! That's like saying it's impossible to have foods you like, foods you tolerate, and foods you hate. Or impossible to have a favorite color. I can't believe you really think this.Of curse I can tell what I prefer, but I can't put a mathematical figure on exactly how much I prefer one over another. Not to mention my preferences will change depending on mood and so forth, I often set out to buy beer with no idea which brands will be chosen and only decide on the spur of the moment and I rarely make the same choice. You might say that that means that each is giving pretty much identical levels of marginal utility, but I could still tell you what I prefer. Sometimes I just like to be spontaneous. But what level of utility is being spontaneous giving me?

To clear up misunderstanding here, I am not saying that we don't experience differing levels of utility depending on product. I am saying that accurate measurements are if not impossible then certainly impractical.

To bring things back to the point I was originally intending to make before I got swept up in this tangent, it is that while marginal utility might very well determine demand, cost of production is still going to be the dominant factor in determining price. As demand rises the price and quantity produced will most likely rise, but that is because suppliers who previously could not produce at lower levels of demand are now able to produce and the higher average cost across all suppliers will mean that the market price will likely go up anyway. Those that can produce at a cheaper level may well try to undercut others by lowering the price, and if they do so average price will fall putting the less efficient producers out of business and so forth.

To sum up, I have no idea to what extent marginal utility determines demand because I do not believe it can be measured enough to tell. No doubt it plays some part though. However I contend that the principal driving force of price, something related to "exchange value" in Marxist jargon is cost of production.

[Self-Owner]

However I contend that the principal driving force of price, something related to "exchange value" in Marxist jargon is cost of production.

I agree but I don't see how this conflicts in any way with marginalism though. In a perfectly competitive market, price = marginal cost. Of course markets are never in perfect competition, but in general if there is some semblance of competition the price will still tend, more or less, towards costs.

[Demogorgon]

I agree but I don't see how this conflicts in any way with marginalism though. In a perfectly competitive market, price = marginal cost. Of course markets are never in perfect competition, but in general if there is some semblance of competition the price will still tend, more or less, towards costs.

It doesn't necessarily contradict marginalism. Indeed the LTV as a whole does not have to contradict marginalism, they can quite happily sit side by side. Indeed the first proponents of marginalism believed they did. My position is not that marginalism is wrong, but rather that there is no sure way to know if it is right and therefore we can not do very much with it.

[jasmine]

You have to appreciate that revolutions are longer running things. The October Revolution in Russia was part of a process that began with the February Revolution and didn't really conclude until the end of the civil war. It was in short a specific event in the process of revolution rather than a revolution in its own right. It was necessary because the Government established by the February Revolution was ineffective and something more capable had to come in.

Let's try to get down to basics. The February revolution happened. It was followed by the October revolution. Were either of these events, or both, necessary? Inevitable? If so why?

Put another way. Many moons ago we had the hunter/gatherer/collective-sort-of society, or so it seems. Why did we have to develop beyond this? Were all the developments we identify historically really necessary and inevitable steps on the road to a truly collective society?

Why could we not just remain an agricultural society without cell phones and cable TV?

[Demogorgon]

Let's try to get down to basics. The February revolution happened. It was followed by the October revolution. Were either of these events, or both, necessary? Inevitable? If so why?

Put another way. Many moons ago we had the hunter/gatherer/collective-sort-of society, or so it seems. Why did we have to develop beyond this? Were all the developments we identify historically really necessary and inevitable steps on the road to a truly collective society?

Why could we not just remain an agricultural society without cell phones and cable TV?
To answer the second question first, the nomadic tribes that made up the first human societies expanded over time due to population growth and as a result came into competition for resources. That required both that they organise themselves in a manner efficient for defending themselves and taking forcefully from others and also that they developed means to get more out of the resources they had. That is why they had to develop. such tribes in very remote parts of the world where there is no such problem with resources do not develop, there are a few such tribes in the amazon for instance, but nearly everywhere the choice was to develop or to die.

As for the question bout the Russian Revolution. There had to be a revolution (of whatever type) because the autocratic Tsarist Government was heavily holding back Russia. The future is not already set however so the particular events that consisted of this revolution were in no way necessary or inevitable. But change itself to allow for development was. People simply will not tolerate continuously being held back and abused for no good purpose.

[jasmine]

To answer the second question first, the nomadic tribes that made up the first human societies expanded over time due to population growth and as a result came into competition for resources. That required both that they organise themselves in a manner efficient for defending themselves and taking forcefully from others and also that they developed means to get more out of the resources they had. That is why they had to develop. such tribes in very remote parts of the world where there is no such problem with resources do not develop, there are a few such tribes in the amazon for instance, but nearly everywhere the choice was to develop or to die.

I think this is true generally. One example, as far as I know, of a society that did not develop or change much technologically or economically is the Australian Aborigines. Certainly they suffered little or no pressure/competition until the Europeans arrived.

However there is a difference between a society that innovates in order to survive and one that innovates in order to expand or dominate. Survival can be seen to be the result of an economic mechanism but how much of Roman imperial expansion was the result of economic necessity?


As for the question bout the Russian Revolution. There had to be a revolution (of whatever type) because the autocratic Tsarist Government was heavily holding back Russia. The future is not already set however so the particular events that consisted of this revolution were in no way necessary or inevitable. But change itself to allow for development was. People simply will not tolerate continuously being held back and abused for no good purpose.

I don't disagree with you but whilst I can see the February revolution being driven by economic pressures I don't think this applies to the October revolution. I'm not sure we can know whether the Mensheviks/SR's could have industrialised the Russian empire or not (their tenure was very brief), but this wasn't the issue for Lenin. Lenin saw the Russian revolution as a means of establishing a bridgehead for the forthcoming European revolution and as such, the revolution he devised and lead, is as close to an act of will as you can find in history. The social conditions were not particularly favourable - Lenin knew this and indeed according to Isaac Deutscher there was much discussion in the Bolshevik party about the consequences of pushing through a revolution ahead of its historical time (with particular reference to the Jacobins and their fate).

As it was the "Jacobin" wing of the Bolshevik party was definitively defeated by about 1928. By 1990 the entire structure had come crashing down. So I'm interested to know how you view the break up of the Soviet Union/Eastern Europe and the reintroduction of capitalism. Was this progress or a major historical defeat for the working class?

[Dystisis]

The first one I think is the absolute heart of serious debate regarding capitalism and communism. The second depresses me, if I'm honest. What can you say to someone who honestly doesn't give a shit?
No need to talk, aim for the groin.

[Black Dagger]

It is also leading, more seriously, to extreme intolerance of certain minorities. Some members here have felt the need to adopt radical feminism. Now don't get me wrong, standard feminism is an excellent position and one that I have no problem endorsing, but radical feminism insists that gender is an entirely social construct. That biological distinctions between genders are entirely incidental. When presented with compelling evidence to the contrary, that is to say the existence of transgendered people, people who have a gender identity entirely different from that of their physical bodies and often have to have extensive surgery to correct their bodies, they respond with hatred. They mock transgendered people, say that male to female transgendered people are rapists, say that such people are mentally ill. This level of prejudice against a highly discriminated minority shocks me, but it is here alright.

Who are you talking about? :confused:

When and where did this discussion take place?

[Demogorgon]

Who are you talking about? :confused:

When and where did this discussion take place?

For obvious reasons I cannot link to the discussion anymore. But Tragic Clown said some truly disgusting things about transgendered people a few months ago. And many of her cronies backed her.

There are some radical feminists who claim that transgendered people are as bad as rapists. That will give you an idea of how the discussion went.

[Black Dagger]

No offense, but TC is not a radical feminist - by any stretch of the term. In fact, as well as having a track record as a 'trans sceptic' she is a well established critic of radical feminism...

[Demogorgon]

No offense, but TC is not a radical feminist - by any stretch of the term. In fact, as well as having a track record as a 'trans sceptic' she is a well established critic of radical feminism...

She has come to associate with it a lot more. A lot of her arguments concerning there being no such thing as gender are obviously coming from it.

Now obviously radical feminism can refer to more than one outlook, so if you want to claim it for another position, then my comments obviously don't apply. But I was referring particularly to the kind of feminism leading to a lot of the prejudice here.

[Black Dagger]

Okay, but TC has a long history of singling out radical feminism - specifically - as well as prominent radical feminists - for critique. I share common ground with marxists on some things, that doesn't make me a marxist. TC may share ideas with some radical feminists, though it should be noted 'trans scepticism' is not limited to radical feminists, but she is clearly a socialist feminist.

[Demogorgon]

Okay, but TC has a long history of singling out radical feminism - specifically - as well as prominent radical feminists - for critique. I share common ground with marxists on some things, that doesn't make me a marxist. TC may share ideas with some radical feminists, though it should be noted 'trans scepticism' is not limited to radical feminists, but she is clearly a socialist feminist.
For the sake of moving the discussion forward, consider my comment on radical feminists withdrawn. However my problem with some people on the board stands. Let's not mince words, I can't stand TC, so it is going to be hard to be objective, but over the last year I have noticed her position on a lot of things change in her views and she has in some ways abandoned socialist feminism and moved towards other forms of it. I don't think she has even noticed it herself given how much she denies it, but given during my expulsion thread, she was (allegedly without even realising it) lifting arguments straight from Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand and using them to back her position. That shows a huge shift to the right and the problem is a lot of people are going along with her.

Granted I have never thought much of her politics because of her prejudice against transgendered people and also her latent homophobia, but she is only one person. By contrast her shift to the right has been embraced by more than a few people, and that is my main problem with the direction the board is taking.